to occur in their own life-time; and it has not occurred yet.  “The Lord said unto my Lord” is better rendered “The Eternal said unto my lord the King”; and is “a simple promise of victory to a royal leader.”  So, in something less than four pages, he dismisses the proof from Prophecy, and goes on to the proof from Miracles.  “Whether we attack them or whether we defend them, does not much matter.  The human mind, as its experience widens, is turning away from them.  And for this reason:  it sees, as its experience widens, how they arise.”  Our duty, then, if we love Jesus Christ and value the New Testament, is to make men see that the claim of Christianity to our allegiance is not based upon Miracles, but rests on quite other grounds, substantial and indestructible.  The good faith of the writers of the New Testament—­the “reporters of Jesus,” as Arnold oddly calls them—­is admitted; but, if we are to read their narratives to any profit, we must convince ourselves of their “liability to mistake.”  Excited, impassioned, wonder-loving disciples surrounded the simplest acts and words of Christ with a thaumaturgical atmosphere, and, when He merely exercised His power of moral help and healing, the “reporters” declared that He cured the sick and drove out evil spirits.  In brief, when the “reporters” narrated miracles wrought by Christ, they were deceived; but, in spite of that, they were excellent men, and our obligations to them are great.  “Reverence for all who, in those first dubious days of Christianity, chose the better part, and resolutely cast in their lot with ‘the despised and rejected of men’!  Gratitude to all who, while the tradition was yet fresh, helped by their writings to preserve and set clear the precious record of the words and life of Jesus!”

And yet that record, as they wrote it, is, according to Arnold, brimful of errors, both in fact and in interpretation; and the Church, which has preserved their written tradition, and kept it concurrently with her own oral tradition, has fallen into enormous and fundamental delusion about those “words” and that “life.”  “Christianity is immortal; it has eternal truth, inexhaustible value, a boundless future.  But our popular religion at present conceives the birth, ministry, and death of Christ as altogether steeped in prodigy, brimful of miracles—­and miracles do not happen.”

The fact that, in the preface to the popular edition of Literature and Dogma, he italicized those last words would appear to show that he attached some special, almost “thaumaturgical,” value to them. Miracles do not happen. It has been justly observed that any man, woman, or child that ever lived might have said this, and have caused no startling sensation.  But when Arnold uttered these words, emphasized them, and seemed to base his case against the Catholic creed upon them, it behoved his disciples to ponder them, and to enquire if, and how far, they were true.