that Mr. Arnold was of Jewish extraction, and proceeded to read passages from his works.”  It might have been more truly said that the lecturer suggested, as interesting to those who speculate in race and pedigree, the question whether Arnold’s remote ancestors had belonged to the Ancient Race, and had emigrated from Germany to Lowestoft, where they dwelt for several generations.  There is certainly no proof that so it was; and genealogical researches would in any case be out of keeping with the scope of this book.  It is enough to note the fact of his affectionate and grateful feeling towards the Jewish race, and this can best be done in his own words.  The present Lord Rothschild, formerly Sir Nathaniel de Rothschild, is the first adherent of the Jewish faith who ever was admitted to the House of Lords, though of course there have been other Peers of Jewish descent.  When Mr. Gladstone created this Jewish peerage,[32] Arnold wrote as follows to an admirable lady whose name often appears in his published Letters—­

“I have received so much kindness from your family, and I have so sincere a regard for yourself, that I should in any case have been tempted to send you a word of congratulation on Sir Nathaniel’s peerage; but I really feel also proud and happy for the British public to have, by this peerage, signally marked the abandonment of its old policy of exclusion, the final and total abandonment of it.  What have we not learned and gained from the people whom we have been excluding all these years!  And how every one of us will see and say this in the future!”

What, in his view, we had “learned and gained” from the Jewish people, is well expressed in the preface to Culture and Anarchy.

“To walk staunchly by the best light one has, to be strict and sincere with oneself, not to be of the number of those who say and do not, to be in earnest—­this is the discipline by which alone man is enabled to rescue his life from thraldom to the passing moment and to his bodily senses, to ennoble it, and to make it eternal.  And this discipline has been nowhere so effectively taught as in the School of Hebraism.  The intense and convinced energy with which the Hebrew, both of the Old and the New Testament, threw himself upon his ideal of righteousness, and which inspired the incomparable definition of the great Christian virtue, Faith—­the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen—­this energy of devotion to its ideal has belonged to Hebraism alone.  As our idea of perfection widens beyond the narrow limits to which the over-rigour of Hebraising has tended to confine it, we shall yet come again to Hebraism for that devout energy in embracing our ideal, which alone can give to man the happiness of doing what he knows.  “If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them!”—­the last word for human infirmity will always be that.  For this word, reiterated with a power now sublime, now affecting, but always admirable, our race will, as long as the world lasts, return to Hebraism.”