In the following year, he thus commented on the Festival of Christmas and its spiritual significance: 

“When we are asked, What really is Christmas, and what does it celebrate?  We answer, the birthday of Jesus.  What is the miracle of the Incarnation?  A homage to the virtue of Pureness, and to the manifestation of this virtue in Jesus.  What is Lent, and the miracle of the temptation?  A homage to the virtue of self-control, and to the manifestation of this virtue in Jesus.”

“That on which Christmas, even in its popular acceptation, fixes our attention, is that to which the popular instinct in attributing to Jesus His miraculous Incarnation, in believing Him born of a pure virgin, did homage—­pureness.  And this, to which the popular instinct thus did homage, was an essential characteristic of Jesus and an essential virtue of Christianity, the obligation of which, though apt to be questioned and discredited in the world, is at the same time nevertheless a necessary fact of nature and eternal truth of reason.”

So much I have quoted in order to show that, in relation to the most important department of human conduct, Arnold’s influence, to use his own phrase, “made for righteousness,” and made for righteousness unequivocally and persistently.  So keen was his sense of the supreme value of this characteristically Christian virtue that he framed what old-fashioned theologians would have called a “hedge of the law."[41] In season and out of season, whether men would bear or whether they would forbear, he taught the sacredness of marriage.  For the Divorce Court and all its works and ways he had nothing but detestation.  He ranked it, with our gin-palaces, among the blots on our civilization.  From Goethe, perhaps a curious authority on such a subject, he quotes approvingly a protest against over-facility in granting divorce, and an acknowledgment that Christianity has won a “culture-conquest” in establishing the sacredness of marriage.  Man’s progress, he says, depends on his keeping such “culture-conquests” as these; and of all attempts to undo these conquests, give back what we have won, and accustom the public mind to laxity, he was the unsparing foe.

It may help to remind us that, in spite of all our shortcomings, we have travelled a little way towards virtue, or at least towards decency, if we recall that in 1863 Lord Palmerston, then in his eightieth year and Prime Minister of England, figured in a very unseemly affair which had the Divorce Court for its centre.  Arnold writes as follows:  “We had ——­ with us one day.  He was quite full of the Lord Palmerston scandal, which your charming newspaper, the Star—­that true reflection of the rancour of Protestant Dissent in alliance with all the vulgarity, meddlesomeness, and grossness of the British multitude—­has done all it could to spread abroad.  It was followed yesterday by the Standard, and is followed to-day by the Telegraph.  Happy people, in spite of our bad climate and cross tempers, with our penny newspapers!”