As far as we know, there never was but one human being to whom they proved overwhelming, and he is a character in a popular work of fiction.  “Miracles do not happen” broke the bruised reed of the Rev. Robert Elsmere’s faith.  That long-legged weakling, with his auburn hair and “boyish innocence of mood,” and sweet ignorance of the wicked world, went down, it will be remembered, like a ninepin before the assaults of a sceptical squire who had studied in Germany.  “A great creed, with the testimony of eighteen centuries at its back, could not find an articulate word to say in its defence....  What weapons the Rector wielded for it, what strokes he struck, has not even in a single line been recorded."[50]

A happily-conceived picture—­was it in Punch?—­represented the Rector on his knees before the Squire, ejaculating, with clasped hands, “Pray, pray, don’t mention another German author, or I shall be obliged to resign my living.”  However, the ruthless Squire persisted; and Elsmere apparently read Literature and Dogma, and, when he came to “Miracles do not happen” he resigned; threw up his Orders, and founded what Arnold would have called “a hole-and-corner” religion of his own.

Well, but, it may be urged, Elsmere is after all only a fictitious character, taken from a novel purporting, as Bishop Creighton said, to describe a man who once was a Christian and ceased to be one, but really describing a man who never was a Christian, and eventually found it out.  This, of course, is true, but it must be presumed that the Reverend Robert is not absolutely the creature of a vivid imagination, but stands for some real men and women who, in actual life, came under the author’s observation.  If that be so, we must admit that Arnold’s dogma about Miracles had a practical effect upon certain minds.  An Elsmere of a different type—­a flippant Elsmere, if such a portent could be conceived—­might have answered that, if miracles happened, they would not be miracles; in other words, that events of frequent occurrence are not called miracles; and that it belongs to the idea of a miracle that it is a special and signal suspension of the Divine Law, for a great purpose and a great occasion.  If, again, Robert, eschewing flippancy, had retired on abstract theory, he might have said that an event so unique and so transcendent as the assumption of human nature by Eternal God seems to demand, in the fitness of things, a method of entry into the material world, and a method of departure from it, wholly and strikingly dissimilar to the established order—­in common parlance, miraculous.  Answers conceived in these two senses—­some rough and popular and declamatory, some learned and argumentative and scientific—­appeared in great numbers.  “Grave objections are alleged against the book....  Its conclusions about the meaning of the term God, and about man’s knowledge of God, are severely condemned; strong objections are taken to our view of the Bible-documents in general,