lar literature of France is a sign that she
has a most dangerous moral disease."

In the following year, he thus commented on the Festival of Christmas
and its spiritual significance:

"When we are asked, What really is Christmas, and what does it
celebrate? We answer, the birthday of Jesus. What is the miracle of the
Incarnation? A homage to the virtue of Pureness, and to the
manifestation of this virtue in Jesus. What is Lent, and the miracle of
the temptation? A homage to the virtue of self-control, and to the
manifestation of this virtue in Jesus."

"That on which Christmas, even in its popular acceptation, fixes our
attention, is that to which the popular instinct in attributing to Jesus
His miraculous Incarnation, in believing Him born of a pure virgin, did
homage--pureness. And this, to which the popular instinct thus did
homage, was an essential characteristic of Jesus and an essential virtue
of Christianity, the obligation of which, though apt to be questioned
and discredited in the world, is at the same time nevertheless a
necessary fact of nature and eternal truth of reason."

So much I have quoted in order to show that, in relation to the most
important department of human conduct, Arnold's influence, to use his
own phrase, "made for righteousness," and made for righteousness
unequivocally and persistently. So keen was his sense of the supreme
value of this characteristically Christian virtue that he framed what
old-fashioned theologians would have called a "hedge of the law."[41] In
season and out of season, whether men would bear or whether they would
forbear, he taught the sacredness of marriage. For the Divorce Court and
all its works and ways he had nothing but detestation. He ranked it,
with our gin-palaces, among the blots on our civilization. From Goethe,
perhaps a curious authority on such a subject, he quotes approvingly a
protest against over-facility in granting divorce, and an acknowledgment
that Christianity has won a "culture-conquest" in establishing the
sacredness of marriage. Man's progress, he says, depends on his keeping
such "culture-conquests" as these; and of all attempts to undo these
conquests, give back what we have won, and accustom the public mind to
laxity, he was the unsparing foe.

It may help to remind us that, in spite of all our shortcomings, we have
travelled a little way towards virtue, or at least towards decency, if
we recall that in 1863 Lord Palmerston, then in hi