the perversion of them by mistaken men.”  Although he calls the treatise in which he addresses himself to this endeavour St. Paul and Protestantism, therein following Renan’s phraseology, in the treatise itself he speaks rather of St. Paul and Puritanism; and this he does because here in England Puritanism is the strong and special representation of Protestantism.  “The Church of England,” he says, “existed before Protestantism and contains much besides Protestantism.”  Remove the Protestant schemes of doctrine, which here and there show themselves in her documents, “and all which is most valuable in the Church of England would still remain”; whereas those schemes are the very life and substance of Puritanism and the Puritan bodies.  “It is the positive Protestantism of Puritanism with which we are here concerned, as distinguished from the negative Protestantism of the Church of England.”  Leaving, then, the Church of England on one side, we fix our gaze on Puritanism, and we see that “the conception of the ways of God to man which Puritanism has formed for itself” has for its cardinal points the terms Election and Justification.  “Puritanism’s very reason for existing depends on the worth of this its vital conception”; and, when we are told that St. Paul is a Protestant doctor whose reign is ending, “we in England can best try the assertion by fixing our eyes on our own Puritans, and comparing their doctrine and their hold on vital truth with St. Paul’s.”

Entering upon this endeavour, he divides Puritanism into Calvinism, and Arminianism or Methodism.  The foremost place in Calvinistic theology belongs to Predestination; in Methodist theology to Justification by Faith.  Calvinism relies most on man’s fears; Methodism most on his hopes.  Both Calvinism and Methodism appeal to the Bible, and above all to St. Paul, for the proof of what they teach.  Very well then, says Arnold, we will enquire what Paul’s account of God’s proceedings with man really is, and whether it tallies with the various representations of the same subject which Puritanism, in its two main divisions, has given.  We will also, he says, follow Puritanism’s example and take the Epistle to the Romans as the chief place for finding what Paul really thought on the points in question.

He illustrates his argument freely by citations from the other undoubtedly Pauline epistles, but he characteristically attributes the Epistle to the Hebrews to Apollos, as being “just such a performance as might naturally have come from ’an eloquent man and mighty in the Scriptures,’ and in whom the intelligence, and the powers of combining, type-finding, and expounding somewhat dominated the religious perceptions.”  While he thus appeals unreservedly to St. Paul, he is careful to point out that we must retranslate him for ourselves if we wish to get rid of the preconceived doctrines of Election and Justification which the translators have read into him.  A strong example