The fact, already stated, that in the last years of his life, Arnold declared that his Discourses in America was the book by which, of all his prose-writings, he most wished to be remembered, gives to whatever he enounced in those Discourses a special authority, a peculiar weight, for his disciples; and nowhere is his testimony on behalf of Virtue and Right Conduct more earnestly delivered.

When the odious Voltaire urged his followers to “Crush the Infamous,” he had in mind that virtue which is specially characteristic of Christianity.[40] A century later Renan said:  “Nature cares nothing for chastity.” Les frivoles out peutetre raison—­“The gay people are perhaps in the right.”  Against this doctrine of devils Arnold uttered a protesting and a warning voice.  He was—­heaven knows!—­no enemy to France.  All that is best in French literature and French life he admired almost to excess.  His sympathy with France was so keen that Sainte-Beuve wrote to him—­“Vous avez traverse notre vie et notre litterature par une ligne interieure, profonde, qui fait les inities, et que vous ne perdrez jamais.”  But in spite of, perhaps because of, this sympathy with France, he felt himself bound to protest and to warn.

Addressing his American audience in November, 1883, he pointed out the dangers which England, Ireland, America, and France incur through habitual disregard, in each case, of some virtue or grace without which national perfection is impossible.  He used, as a kind of text for his discourse, the famous passage from the Philippians.  “Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are elevated, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are amiable, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, have these in your mind, let your thoughts run upon these.”

Whatsoever things are pure. [Greek:  osa hagua]—­thus the teacher of Culture moralized on this pregnant phrase.

[Illustration:  The Union Rooms, Oxford

At the Jubilee of the Union, 1873, Matthew Arnold responded to Dr.
Liddon’s speech proposing ‘Literature’

Photo H.W.  Taunt]

“The question was once asked by the Town Clerk of Ephesus:  ’What man is there that knoweth not how that the city of the Ephesians is a worshipper of the great goddess Diana?’ Now really, when one looks at the popular literature of the French at this moment—­their popular novels, popular stage-plays, popular newspapers—­and at the life of which this literature of theirs is the index, one is tempted to make a goddess out of a word of their own, and then, like the Town Clerk of Ephesus, to ask:  ’What man is there that knoweth not how that the city of the French is a worshipper of the great goddess Lubricity?’ Or rather, as Greek is the classic and euphonious language for names of gods and goddesses, let us take her name from the Greek Testament, and call her the goddess