Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, after hearing a sermon by Dr. Howson, Dean of Chester, wrote thus in his diary:  “One good bit—­that the emptying Christianity of dogma would perish it, like Charlemagne’s face when exhumed.”  It was a striking simile, and if well worked out by a rhetorician, say of Dr. Liddon’s type, it might have powerfully clinched some great argument for the necessary place of dogma in Christian theology.  But the sermon has vanished, and we can only conjecture from the date of the entry—­October 5, 1869—­that the good Dean’s ire had been excited by Matthew Arnold’s first appearance in the field of theological controversy.  Six years before, indeed, Arnold had touched that field, when in The Bishop and the Philosopher he quizzed Colenso, “the arithmetical bishop who couldn’t forgive Moses for having written a Book of Numbers,"[46] about his “jejune and technical manner of dealing with Biblical controversy.”  “It is,” he wrote, “a result of no little culture to attain to a clear perception that science and religion are two wholly different things.  The multitude will for ever confuse them....  Dr. Colenso, in his first volume, did all he could to strengthen the confusion, and to make it dangerous.”  “Let us have all the science there is from the men of science; from the men of religion let us have religion.”

But in that earlier essay he had merely criticised a critic; he had not originated criticisms of his own.  So he had touched the field of theological controversy, but had not appeared on it as a performer.  That now he so appeared was probably due to the success which attended Culture and Anarchy.  The publication of that book had immensely extended the circle of his audience.  Those who care for literature are few; those who care for politics are many.  And, though the politics of Culture and Anarchy were new and strange, hard to be understood, and running in all directions off the beaten track, still the professional politicians, and that class of ordinary citizens which aims at cultivation and seeks a wider knowledge, took note of Culture and Anarchy as a book which must be read, and which, though they might not always understand it, would at least show them which way the wind was blowing.  The present writer perfectly recalls the comfortable figure of a genial merchant, returned from business to his suburban villa, and saying:  “Well, I shall spend this Saturday afternoon on Mat Arnold’s new book, and I shall not understand one word of it.”  It had never occurred to the good man that he was either a Hebraizer or a Hellenizer.  He had always believed that he was a Liberal, a Low Churchman, and a silk-mercer.