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Page 41
But when we leave the Preface, even such faint liveliness as this
deserts us. The text contains four (or five, the second being divided
into two parts) essays, lectures, or papers, _A Psychological
Parallel_, _Bishop Butler and the Zeit-Geist_, The Church of England_,
and _A Last Word on the Burials Bill_. All had appeared in
_Macmillan's Magazine_ or the _Contemporary Review_ during
1876, while _Bishop Butler_ had been delivered as two lectures at
Edinburgh, and _The Church of England_ as an address to the
London Clergy at Sion College, during the spring of that year.
Over all there is a curious constraint, the evidence of a mood not
very difficult to analyse, and in the analysis of which lies almost
all the satisfaction or edification to be got out of the book. The
writer, though by no means abandoning his own point of view, and even
flattering himself that some _modus vivendi_ is about to be
established between himself and the more moderate supporters of the
Church and of religion, betrays not merely the well-known
self-excusing and self-accusing tone, but odd flashes of discontent
and weariness--nay, even a fretfulness such as might have been that of
a Moses at Rephidim who could not bring water out of the rock. _A
Psychological Parallel_ is an attempt to buttress the apologia by
referring to Sir Matthew Hale's views on witchcraft, to Smith, the
Cambridge Platonist and Latitudinarian, and to the _Book of
Enoch_ (of which, by the way, it is a pity that Mr Arnold did not
live to see Mr Charles's excellent translation, since he desiderated a
good one). Of course the argument is sun-clear. If Hale was mistaken
about witchcraft, St Paul may have been mistaken about the
Resurrection. Expressions attributed to Christ occur in the _Book of
Enoch_, therefore they are not original and divine, &c., &c. And it
would be out of place to attempt any reply to this argument, the reply
being in each case as sun-clear as the argument itself. No believer in
supernatural religion that I ever met considered Sir Matthew Hale to
have been inspired; and no believer in the divinity of Christ can fail
to hold that His adoption of words (if He did adopt them) makes them
His.
The gist of the Butler lectures is considerably less clear, and, if
only for that reason, it cannot be succinctly stated or answered. In
particular, it requires rather careful "collection" in order to
discover what our friend the Zeit-Geist has to do in this galley. I
should imagine that, though an Edinburgh audience is by no means
alarmed at philosophy, 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 equivocal as when he doubles
the part of non-expert with that of candid friend. How Mr Arnold
succeeded in this exceedingly delicate attempt I do not propose to
examine at any length. He thought himself that he had "sufficiently
marked the way in which the new world was to be reached." Paths to new
worlds are always interesting, but in reading, or rather re-reading,
the sailing directions of this Columbus twenty years after date, one
may be a little disappointed. The sum appears to be a somewhat
Tootsian declaration that things of general are of no consequence. The
Church is better than Dissent; at least she would be so if she dropped
all her dogma, the greater part of her superstitions about the rights
of property and "my duty to my neighbour," and as much as possible of
the barriers which separate her from Dissent itself. A most moderate
eirenicon. Still less need be said of the Burials Bill paper, which is
a sort of appendix or corollary to the Sion speech, at the end of
which the subject had been referred to. The particular question, in
this phase of it, has long ceased to burn, and one need not disturb
the ashes.
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