Fourth Gospel whizzes at him; or as, while he is trying to patch up
his romantic reconstructions of imaginary Jewish history and religion,
the push of some aggressive reviewer bids him make good his challenge
to metaphysical theologians. But this interest is only passing.

In the Preface there is indeed some of the old attempt at liveliness.
Professor Clifford himself, then dead, is disposed of with a not
ungraceful mixture of pity and satire; Messrs Moody and Sankey are not
unpleasantly rallied; Satan and Tisiphone, Mr Ruskin and Sir Robert
Phillimore, once more remind one of the groves of Blarney or the more
doubtful chorus in the _Anti-Jacobin_. But the apologist is not
really light-hearted: he cannot keep the more solemn part of his
apologia out of the Preface itself, and assures us that the story of
Adam's fall "is all a legend. It never really happened, any of it."
Again one asks Mr Arnold, as seriously as possible, "How _do_ you
know that? On your own calculus, with your own estimate of evidence,
how is it possible for you to know that? You may, on your principles,
say that you are insufficiently persuaded that it _did_ happen;
but how can you, without preternatural revelation (the very thing you
will not admit) say that it did _not?_ Surely there is some want
of intellectual seriousness in thus lightly ignoring every rule of law
and logic, of history and of common-sense?"

But the embarrassment thus revealed naturally shows itself even more
in the book itself, notwithstanding the fact that Mr Arnold expressly
declines to reply to those who have attacked _Literature and
Dogma_ as anti-Christian and irreligious. Not even by summarily
banishing this not inconsiderable host can he face the rest
comfortably: and he has to resort to the strangest reasons of defence,
to the most eccentric invitation of reinforcements from afar.

The strangest of all these, the clearest proof in itself of flurry and
sense of need, is exhibited in his summoning--of all wonderful things
--of Comparative Philology to the rescue of Literature. To rebut the
criticism on his denial of a Personal God, he takes refuge in the
ethnological meaning of Deus, which, it seems, is "Shining." The poor
plain mind, already staggered by Mr Arnold's private revelations as to
what did _not_ happen 6000 years ago (or earlier) in the garden
of Eden, quite succumbs before this privilegium of omniscience. One
had thought that the results of philology and ety