“If the people are to receive a religion of the Bible, we must find for the Bible some other basis than that which the Churches assign to it, a verifiable basis and not an assumption.  This new religion of the Bible the people may receive; the version now current of the religion of the Bible they will not receive.”

He sets out on this enterprise by repeating what he had said in St. Paul and Protestantism about the misunderstandings which had arisen from affixing to certain phrases such as grace, new birth, and justification, a fixed, rigid, and quasi-scientific meaning.  “Terms which with St. Paul are literary terms, theologians have employed as if they were scientific terms.”  In saying this he goes no further than several of his predecessors and contemporaries on the Liberal side in theology.  Even so orthodox a divine as Dr. Vaughan laid it down that “Nothing in the Church’s history has been more fertile in discord and error than the tendency of theologians to stereotype metaphor."[49] Bishop Hampden’s much-criticised Bampton Lectures had merely aimed at stating the accepted doctrines in terms other than those derived from schoolmen and mataphysicians.  Dean Stanley’s unrivalled powers of literary exposition were consistently employed in the same endeavour.  To call Abraham a Sheikh was only an ingenious attempt at naturalizing Genesis.  But in Literature and Dogma Arnold applies this method far more fundamentally.  According to him, even “God” is a literary term to which a scientific sense has been arbitrarily applied.  He pronounces, without waiting to prove, that there is absolutely no foundation in reason for the idea that God is a “Person, the First Great Cause, the moral and intelligent Governor of the Universe.”  We are not to dream that He is a “Being who thinks and loves”; or that we can love Him or address our prayers to Him with any chance of being heard.  What then, according to Arnold, is God? and here he answers with his celebrated definition.  God is a “stream of tendency, not ourselves, which makes for Righteousness,” or good conduct.  Because this power works eternally and unchangeably, it is called “The Eternal,” which thus becomes a sort of nickname for God.  And as for our relations with God, called by most people Religion, well—­“Religion is morality touched by Emotion.”  This, and nothing more.

For the beginnings of religious history, he goes to the House of Israel.  The Israelites, as he was always insisting, had a strong sense for Righteousness, or Conduct; and they found happiness in pursuing it.  The idea of Righteousness was their God, and the enjoyment of Righteousness their religion.  This simple conception held its own for generations; but, by the time of the Maccabees, the Israelites had become familiar with the idea of a resurrection from the dead and a final judgment.  “The phantasmagories of more prodigal and wild imaginations have mingled with the product of Israel’s austere spirit.”