“Various objections have been taken from various quarters to this point and that in the argument of Butler; but Mr. Arnold’s criticisms, as a whole, remain wholly isolated and unsupported.  It is impossible to acquit him of the charge of a carelessness implying levity, and of an ungovernable bias towards finding fault....  Mr. Arnold himself will probably suffer more from his own censures than the great Christian philosopher who is the object of them.  And it is well for him that all they can do is to effect some deduction from the fame which has been earned by him in other fields, as a true man, a searching and sagacious literary critic, and a poet of genuine creative genius."[55]

It is now time to enquire what practical effect he produced by all this writing (and a good deal which followed it in the same sense) on the religious thought of his time.  This is a question which, in the absence of any clear or general testimony, one can only answer by the light of one’s own experience.  The present writer can aver that, so far as his own personal knowledge goes, the strange case of Robert Elsmere was a unique instance.  He has, of course, known plenty of people to whom, alas! revealed Religion—­the accepted Faith of the Church and the Gospel—­was a tale of no meaning, which they regarded either with blank indifference or with bitter and furious hostility.  But, in all these cases, dissent from the Christian creed depended upon negations far deeper than “Miracles do not happen.”  It depended on a stark incapacity to conceive the ideas of God, of permitted evil, of sin, its consequences and its remedy, and of life after death.  Where there was the capacity to conceive these mysteries, men were not troubled by the minor questions of miracle, prophecy, and textual research.  To use an illustration which the present writer has used elsewhere, they were not shaken by Robert Elsmere, not confirmed by Lux Mundi.  Still less were they agitated by the literary dogmaticism of Matthew Arnold.  Many people disliked his style, his methods, his illustrations; and, not knowing the man, disliked him also.  But, as he justly observed, if he had written as these objectors wished him to write, no one would have read him; so he went on in his “sinuous, easy, unpolemical” way; and the people who disliked him closed their ears, and “flocked all the more eagerly to Messrs. Moody and Sankey.”

Mr. Gladstone wrote in 1895—­“It is very difficult to keep one’s temper in dealing with M. Arnold when he touches on religious matters.  His patronage of a Christianity fashioned by himself is to me more offensive and trying than rank unbelief.”