MR. ARNOLD ON THE COLLECTS.
[To THY EDITOR OF TILE " SPECTATOR:] you allow me to supplement your exposure of Mr. Matthew Arnold's new version of the message of Christmas, with "the miracle of the Incarnation" left out, by calling attention to his equally characteristic appeal in support of his view to the testimony of " Catholic antiquity" ? He tells us that " here the Collects of the Church, which have come down to us from Catholic antiquity—from the times when all legend was most unhesitatingly received, most fondly loved, most delighted in for its own sake—arc the best testimony." And he proceeds at once to quote the Collects in the English Prayer-book for (a) the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany, (b) Christmas Day, (c) Easter Eve.
Now, I quite agree with Mr. Arnold in thinking those Collects beautiful and impressive, though I differ from him in thinking that their beauty and impressiveness depend altogether on the truth of " the miracle amply and impressively stated " in them, without which they are reduced to a tissue of profane and unmeaning verbiage. But the curious point is that the two first were composed in the sixteenth century, the third in the seventeenth, so that not one of them ".has come down to us from Catholic antiquity." And what makes this elaborate blunder the more amusing is that—with the exception of those for Saints' days, most of which were, for obvious reasons, rewritten or remodelled by the Reformers—there are only about half-a-dozen Collects in the Prayer-book not translated directly from the Sarnm Missal. Mr. Arnold has gone out of his way to select three out of these few modern compositions to illustrate " the testimony of Catholic antiquity !" In itself the point is of little consequence ; but it serves to indicate how far a writer, who is confident that none of the Christian miracles are "verifiable," can be trusted to verify the facts alleged in support of his own Neo-Christian parody of the Gospel.—I am, Sir, in spite of Mr. Arnold,
ONE WHO STILL BELIEVES IN "THE LEGEND Or CHRISTMAS." •
Previous page
