Arnold, undertaking the most delicate and
critical crusade that can possibly be imagined against the dearest
opinions of almost everybody, will have with _his_ method. The hard
hits which the Pharisees got, and which the early churches sometimes
received from Paul, were direct, terrible blows, adapted to a
primitive age: Mr. Arnold's hits, full of grace and sting, are adapted
to our own age, and are rather worse. When he calls Pius IX. the
amiable old pessimist in Saint Peter's chair, or when he calls Dr.
Marsh, an Anglican divine who had hung in the railway stations some
sets of biblical questions and answers which he does not approve, a
"venerable and amiable Coryphaeus of our evangelical party," he uses
expressions that will lash the ordinary Catholic and Churchman of his
audience harder than the fisherwoman was lashed in being called an
isosceles and a parallelopipedon. Not much more "sweetly reasonable"
will he seem to the ordinary Cantab. when he says that the Cambridge
addiction to muscularity would have sent the college, but for the
Hebrew religion, "in procession, vice-chancellor, bedels, masters,
scholars, and all, in spite of the professor of modern philosophy,
to the temple of Aphrodite;" nor anymore "sweetly reasonable" will
he seem to the ordinary innocent, conventional Churchman in asserting
that the God of righteousness is displeased and disserved by men
uttering such doggerel hymns as "Out of my stony griefs Bethel
I'll raise," and "My Jesus to know, and feel His blood flow;" or in
asserting that the modern preacher, who calls people infidels for
false views of the Bible, should have the epithet returned upon him
for his own false views; and that it would be just for us to say, "The
bishop of So-and-so, the dean of So-and-so, and other infidel laborers
of the present day;" or "That rampant infidel, the archdeacon of
So-and-so, in his recent letter on the Athanasian creed;" or "_The
Rock_, the _Church Times_, and the rest of the infidel press;" or "The
torrent of infidelity which pours every Sunday from our pulpits!
Just it would be," pursues the author, "and by no means inurbane; but
hardly, perhaps, Christian." The question is not so much whether such
allocutions are Christian--which they possibly may be in Mr. Arnold's
clearer aether--as whether they are adapted to his purpose of winning.
He manages here and there, indeed, in trying on his new conceptions of
old truths, to be exquisitely offensive. It