and as mockingly as Sancho Panza followed Don Quixote.  The only heaven of which the political Liberal dreamed was what Arnold called “the glorified and unending tea-meeting of popular Protestantism.”  And the portion of the Party which regarded itself as the intellectual wing, seemed to have reverted to the temper described by Bishop Butler; “taking for granted that Christianity is not so much as a subject of enquiry, but that it is now at length discovered to be fictitious”; and habitually talking as if “this were an agreed point among all people of discernment.”  Great was the vexation of the “old Liberal hacks” who had been repeating these dismal shibboleths, and ignoring or denying the greatest force in human life, to find in this new teacher of liberal ideas a convinced and persistent opponent.  He affirmed that Religion was the best, the sweetest, and the strongest thing in the world; he insisted that without it there could be no perfect culture, no complete civilization; he showed a reverent admiration for the historical character and teaching of Jesus Christ; he urged the example of His “mildness and sweet reasonableness.”  He taught that the best way of extending Christ’s kingdom on earth was by sweetening the character and brightening the lives of the men and women whose nature He shared.

It belongs to another part of this work to enquire what he meant by Religion and Christianity, and how far his interpretations accorded with, or how far they departed from, the traditional creed of Christendom.  But enough, perhaps, has been said to explain why the appearance of Culture and Anarchy so profoundly disquieted the “old Liberal hacks” and the popular teachers of irreligion.  One of these called Christianity “that awful plague which has destroyed two civilizations and but barely failed to slay such promise of good as is now struggling to live amongst men.”  Of that teacher, and of others like him, Arnold wrote in later years:  “If the matter were not so serious one could hardly help smiling at the chagrin and manifest perplexity of such of one’s friends as happen to be philosophical radicals and secularists, at having to reckon with religion again when they thought its day was quite gone by, and that they need not study it any more or take account of it any more; that it was passing out, and a kind of new gospel, half Bentham, half Cobden, in which they were themselves particularly strong, was coming in.  And perhaps there is no one who more deserves to be compassionated than an elderly or middle-aged man of this kind, such as several of their Parliamentary spokesmen and representatives are.  For perhaps the younger men of the Party may take heart of grace, and acquaint themselves a little with religion, now that they see its day is by no means over.  But, for the older ones, their mental habits are formed, and it is almost too late for them to begin such new studies.  However, a wave of religious reaction is evidently passing over Europe, due very much to our revolutionary and philosophical friends having insisted upon it that religion was gone by and unnecessary, when it was neither the one nor the other.”