Yet, after all, documents, however well-tested and established, are not the backbone of the Christian religion.  It may well be that to minds inured from infancy to the worship of the letter; to believers in “the Bible and the Bible only” as the ground of their religion; Arnold’s solvent methods and free handling of the sacred text were alarming and revolutionary.  But they fell harmless on the minds which had long schooled themselves in the Christian tradition; which took the Bible from the Church, not the Church from the Bible; and which realized that what had sufficed for the life of Christians before the Canon was contemplated would suffice again, even if every book contained in the Canon were resolved into mere literature.

Yet again, a criticism brought freely and justly against his biblical disputations was that in his appeal to Letters and to what he conceived to be human nature, he overlooked the at least equally important appeal to History.  He seems indeed to have avoided coming to close quarters with the historical defenders of the Christian Creed.  It was easy enough to poke fun at Archbishop Thomson, Bishop Wilberforce, and Bishop Ellicott; Mr. Moody, and the Rev. W. Cattle, and the clergymen who write to the Guardian.  But Bishop Lightfoot he left severely alone, with Bishop Westcott and Dr. Sanday and students of the same authority; and he would probably have justified his neglect of their contentions by saying, as he had said twenty years before, in his light and airy fashion, that “it was not possible for a clergyman to treat these matters satisfactorily.”

But, though clergymen are thus put quietly out of court, a layman may still be heard; and one could almost wish that he had lived to handle, in some fresh preface to Literature and Dogma, such a confession of faith as that which Lord Salisbury gave in 1894—­

“To me, the central point is the Resurrection of Christ, which I believe.  Firstly, because it is testified by men who had every opportunity of seeing and knowing, and whose veracity was tested by the most tremendous trials, both of energy and endurance, during long lives.  Secondly, because of the marvellous effect it had upon the world.  As a moral phenomenon, the spread and mastery of Christianity is without a parallel.  I can no more believe that colossal moral effects can be without a cause, than I can believe that the various motions of the magnet are without a cause, though I cannot wholly explain them.  To any one who believes the Resurrection of Christ, the rest presents little difficulty.  No one who has that belief will doubt that those who were commissioned by Him to speak—­Paul, Peter, Mark, John—­carried a Divine message.  St. Matthew falls into the same category.  St. Luke has the warrant of the generation of Christians who saw and heard the others.”

So far the testimony of a layman.  Arnold, as we know, loved and elegized one Dean of Westminster.  Would he have tolerated the testimony of another?