osophy, the majority, perhaps the enormous majority, of
Mr Arnold's hearers must have had a singularly dim idea as to his
exact drift. Indeed I cannot say that after reading the piece when it
first appeared, and again, twenty years later, for the purposes of
this book, I have any very distinct notion of that drift myself. If it
merely means that Butler, being an eighteenth-century person, was
afflicted with the eighteenth-century limitations by the Zeit-Geist,
eighty-six pages, and an imposing German compound at the head of every
other one of them, seem a good deal for telling us this. If it is a
sort of indirect attack upon--an oblique demurrer to--Butler's
constructive-aggressive orthodoxy in psychology and religion, one is
bound to say with all politeness, first, that it is a case of _impar
congressus_, and secondly, that the adventurous knight does not
give himself a fair chance. It will take more than eighty-six not very
large pages, and a German word at the top of the alternate ones, to do
that! In the opening sketch of Butler himself Mr Arnold could not but
be agreeable and even delightful. It gives us, indeed, most pleasant
promise of work in this same good kind soon to follow; but for the
rest we grope till we find, after some seventy-three of the
eighty-six, that what Mr Arnold wanted to say is that Butler did not
handle, and could not then have handled, miracles and the fulfilment
of prophecy satisfactorily. Butler, like St Paul, is undoubtedly
inconvenient for those who believe that miracles do not happen, and
that prophecies were either not made or not fulfilled. So he must be
got rid of. But whether he is got rid of,--whether Mr Arnold and the
Zeit-Geist have put him on the shelf as a venerable but antiquated
object,--that is another question.

The two remaining essays show us Mr Arnold, in his character of at
least would-be practical statesman, dealing no longer with points of
doctrine but with the affairs of the Church as a political body. The
circumstances of the first--the address delivered at Sion College--had
a certain piquancy: whether they had also sweet reasonableness and an
entire accordance with the fitness of things is a question no doubt
capable of being debated. Me the situation strikes, I must confess, as
a little grotesque. The layman in the wide sense, the amateur, always
occupies a rather equivocal position when he addresses experts and the
profession; but his position is never so equivoc