Another element in the satisfaction with which dignitaries and clergymen came to regard him was the fact that he was so definitely a supporter of the Church of England.  To the principle of Established Churches, as part of the wider principle of extending everywhere the scope of the State, he was always friendly; but he felt the difficulty of maintaining them where, as in Scotland, they had nothing to show except “a religious service which is perhaps the most dismal performance ever invented by man,” and a theology shared by all the non-established bodies round about.  No such difficulty appeared in the case of the Church of England, with its historic claim, its seemly worship, its distinctive doctrine; so of that Church as by law established he was the consistent defender.  Towards ugliness, hideousness, rawness, whether manifested in life or in letters, he was always implacable; and this sentiment no doubt accounts for much of his hostility to Dissent.  Margate was, in his eyes, a “brick-and-mortar image of English Protestantism, representing it in all its prose, all its uncomeliness—­let me add, all its salubrity.”  When criticising the proposal to let Dissenters bury their dead with their own rites in the National Church-yards, he likened the dissenting Service to a reading from Eliza Cook, and the Church’s Service to a reading from Milton, and protested against the Liberal attempt to “import Eliza Cook into a public rite.”  He even was bold enough to cite his friend Mr. John Morley as secretly sharing this repugnance to Eliza Cook in a public rite. “Scio, rex Agrippa, quia credis. He is keeping company with his Festus Chamberlain and his Drusilla Collings, and cannot openly avow the truth; but in his heart he consents to it.”

For the beauty, the poetry, the winningness of Catholic worship and Catholic life Arnold had the keenest admiration.  “The need for beauty is a real and ever rapidly growing need in man; Puritanism cannot satisfy it, Catholicism and the Church of England can.”  He dwelt with delighted interest on Eugenie de Guerin’s devotional practices, her happy Christmas in the soft air of Languedoc, her midnight Mass, her beloved Confession.  On the Mass itself no one has written more sympathetically, although he disavowed the fundamental doctrine on which the Mass is founded.  “Once admit the miracle of the ‘atoning sacrifice,’ once move in this order of ideas, and what can be more natural and beautiful than to imagine this miracle every day repeated, Christ offered in thousands of places, everywhere the believer enabled to enact the work of redemption and unite himself with the Body whose sacrifice saves him?”