For Arnold to find that he was in possession of a pulpit—­that he had secured a position from which he could preach his doctrine with a certainty that it would be heard and pondered, if not accepted—­was a new and an invigorating experience.  He at once began to make the most of his opportunity.  While the Press was still teeming with criticisms of Culture and Anarchy, he began to extend his activities from the field of political and social criticism to that of theological controversy.  The latter experiment seems to have grown spontaneously out of the former.  In Culture and Anarchy he had charged Puritanism with imagining that in the Bible it had, as its own special possession, a unum necessarium, which made it independent of Sweetness and Light, and guided it aright without the aid of culture.  “The dealings,” he said, “of Puritanism with the writings of St. Paul afford a noteworthy illustration of this.  Nowhere so much as in the writings of St. Paul, and in that apostle’s greatest work, the Epistle to the Romans, has Puritanism found what seemed to furnish it with the one thing needful, and to give it canons of truth absolute and final.”

This reliance of Puritanism on Holy Scripture, or certain portions of it, seems to have set him on the endeavour to ascertain how far the Puritans had really mastered the meaning of the writers on whom they relied; and more particularly of St. Paul.  And this particular direction seems to have been given to his thoughts by a sentence, then recently published, of Renan:  “After having been for three hundred years, thanks to Protestantism, the Christian doctor par excellence, Paul is now coming to an end of his reign.”

Arnold, as his manner was, fastened on these last words, and made them the text of his treatise on St. Paul and Protestantism, which began to appear in October, 1869. “St. Paul is now coming to an end of his reign. Precisely the contrary, I venture to think, is the judgment to which a true criticism of men and of things leads us.  The Protestantism which has so used and abused St. Paul is coming to an end;... but the real reign of St. Paul is only beginning.”

In Culture and Anarchy he had shown how “the over-Hebraizing of Puritanism, and its want of a wide culture, so narrow its range and impair its vision that even the documents which it thinks all-sufficient, and to the study of which it exclusively rivets itself, it does not rightly understand, but is apt to make of them something quite different from what they really are.  In short, no man, who knows nothing else, knows even his Bible.”  And he showed how readers of the Bible attached to essential words and ideas of the Bible a sense which was not the writer’s.  Now, he said, let us go further on the same path, and, “instead of lightly disparaging the great name of St. Paul, let us see if the needful thing is not rather to rescue St. Paul and the Bible from