DR. ARNOLD AFTER FIFTY YEARS.

THE meeting last Monday in the school dining-hall adjoining the cloisters of Westminster Abbey to raise a monument in the Abbey to Dr. Arnold, fifty years after Lis death, was, as the speakers evidently felt, not so much -a reminiscence of his life,—though it was that too,—as a 'testimony to the astonishing growth of Dr. Arnold's in- iluence since the date of his death. Those who felt most 'keenly what England had lost in losing him, felt still more keenly what England had gained by the fall of that seed into the ground, and the much fruit that its death had brought forth. Yet even that great gain has not been without its compensating elements of loss. The impressive, almost majestic earnestness which effected a transformation in the whole tone of English ideals of character and the whole type of English -school life, has in some directions, and those the directions in which its influence has been most keenly felt, proved to be 'negative as well as positive. The great poet who celebrated Dr. Arnold in the noble verses on "Rugby Chapel," was not only Arnold's pupil but his son; and yet he represented and dis- seminated a religious attitude of mind very different from his father's,—indeed, resembling his father's only in the some- what imperious character of his intellectual make. Again, *the poet and pupil who was perhaps even more powerfully affected by Arnold's moral genius than his son himself, Arthur Hugh Clough, represented and disseminated an atti- tude of mind towards the Christian religion very different 'from his master's. Further, Arnold's pupil and biographer, Arthur Stanley, who, by his "Life," laid the foundation of Arnold's vast popularity, did perhaps as much to dissipate con- fidence in the historical Christianity which Arnold accepted, as be did to create for him an enduring fame. And the novelist who now best represents not only the ethos of Arnold's earnest- ness, but the eagerness of his wish to stamp the younger generation with that type of character,—we mean, of course, his granddaughter, Mrs. Humphry Ward,—is de- voting her genius to what Dr. Arnold himself would have thought a negative crusade as regards faith and doctrine, aw less than to a positive crusade as regards life and work.

If we were asked what the sum total of Arnold's influence on the world had been, we should reply not only in the language used at the meeting, true and inspiring as that language was, but also in a reminder that a good deal of the earnestness in which he had made his mark most decisively, had resulted in stimulating earnestness of what we might fairly call a destruc- tive kind, a kind that dissipates faith even while it scores deep the lines of ethical zeal. Dr. Arnold himself accepted a very different type of faith from that of any of the four great recipients of his influence whom we have just men- tioned, two of whom are his descendants, and two only his disciples. But it is rather curious that the two who are his descendants as well as his disciples, have had a decidedly greater influence in breaking down confidence in his historical Christianity, than the two who were his disciples only.

Matthew Arnold's writings on Christian dogma are decidedly more subversive of his father's Christianity than Clough's more moderate and more dubious criticism. Mrs. Humphry Ward's onslaught on historical Christianity has been far more vehement than Arthur Stanley's pleas for universal compre- hension. It looks as if Dr. Arnold's intensity of moral purpose contained implicit germs of a solvent for the Christian creed which he himself firmly held, no less than a commanding ethical impulse to share with others whatever the believer could believe, as well as the disbelief in whatever he was compelled

to reject. Matthew Arnold certainly thought so. For though in"Rugby Chapel" he delineated only the great moral force

of his father's courage and compassion, in the exquisite stanzas "From the Grande Chartreuse" he certainly includes him as one of the teachers who had saved him from the Catholic reaction in which many of his contemporaries had been involved, and plunged him into doubt :—

" For rigorous teachers seized my youth,

And purged its faith and trimmed its fire, Showed me the high white star of Truth, There bade me gaze, and there aspire. E'en now their whispers pierce the gloom, What d,ost thou in this living tomb?

Forgive me, masters of the mind, At whose behest I long ago

So much unlearnt, so much resigned—

I come not here to be your foe, I seek these anchorites not in ruth, To curse and to deny your truth.

Not as their friend or child I speak !

But as, on some far Northern strand, Thinking of his own Gods, a Greek

In pity and mournful awe might stand Before some fallen Runic stone—

For both were faiths, and both are gone.

Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born, With nowhere yet to rest my head Like these, on earth I wait forlorn. Their faith, my tears the world deride— I come to shed them at their side."

And now Dr. Arnold's granddaughter, too, has just told us with that impressive earnestness which dignifies the vagueness of her aspirations, how necessary she thinks it that children should be taught to regard the belief of the early Church in Christ's resurrection as a mere subjective measure of the love his disciples bore to him, and has acquainted us bow well she can even imagine, though she does not teach, a Christianity "without the hope of God." No doubt she can imagine any number of religious hospices constructed of mere cards which will never shelter any one. But is it the severe critic of historical evidence who should tell us what she can imagine, rather than what she must believe?

What was it in Dr. Arnold's " earnestness " that seemed to have the effect of denuding those whom he most powerfully influenced, of so much belief which he himself continued to hold, no less than of spurring them on to an enthusiastic career of missionary zeal for the rescue of others from the contagion of indifference, and of careless, pleasure-loving ease ? We suspect it was partly his eager historical craving to grope about the roots of all great institutions and analyse their origin, but much more that moral intolerance of any kind of authority not itself sternly and exclusively moral, which showed itself in his vehement attacks on the Anglican movement. It seems to us that what we may call the Arnold school of religion challenges all authority which does not proceed wholly from the con- science ; and we venture to say that, great as the sphere of the conscience is, it is not competent, unassisted and without the help of high intellectual guidance, to lay the foundations of

any revelation. The stern "earnestness" of the Arnold school is a grand earnestness, but an earnestness almost un- accompanied by humility. Even in Dr. Arnold's own writings, inspiring and noble as they are, we feel something of that want. It was the want which F. D. Maurice, who shared fully the earnestness, without sharing the seductively im- perious attitude of mind with which in Arnold it was associated, supplied, but which is more or less wanting in all the most characteristic disciples of the Arnold school, especially in the great poet, and the powerful novelist who told us the story of Robert Elsmere's collapse of creed and painful efforts at reconstructing faith on the airy basis of his own arbitrary selections from the traditions concern- ing Christ's teaching and life. It is surely quite unreasonable to take Christ as the very moral type of human nature, and then to assume that there was no higher and deeper intellectual knowledge of God in the spiritual atmosphere which was generated by his presence and teaching in the world, than is consistent with those modern theories which make the most theological of all the Gospels, and the most theological passages even of the first three Gospels, as well as the whole theology of the Epistles, a mere dream-world that has reared itself upon no historical basis at all. It will be said, of course, and with perfect truth, that this was not Dr. Arnold's own view, though it has been the view of two of the most illustrious of his descendants, and of his two most eminent pupils. No doubt. And it is more than possible that if Dr. Arnold had foreseen this solvent influence of his stern moral teaching, he would have recoiled from it, and discerned the deficiencies in that too imperiously ethical spirit which was destined apparently to undermine the foundations of the teaching best fitted to sustain its eager life. Nevertheless, we do think that "that severe, that earnest air" which characterised Dr. Arnold, and which made his attacks on the Anglicans of his day so fierce, had in it an implicit tendency to generate this dictatorial Liberalism that now appears to be decomposing Christianity, while it professes to be shielding and reconstructing it. We .can never understand that so-called" Liberal" disposition to -depreciate the whole intellectual environment of Christianity -amongst those who hold up Christ as the ideal standard of human perfection. Surely the moral ideal of the race could not have been bound up with so feeble an intellectual insight into its own character, prospects, and history. And glad as we are to point out that Dr. Arnold himself gave no sanction to the paradox which has obtained so much credence amongst his school, we cannot help thinking that the imperious and scornful intellectual attitude which characterises that school, was caught at the feet of the great but rather aggressive ecclesiastical Liberal who inspired, and himself initiated, the mighty reformation which he has brought about in the educational life of this great country. Clough used to speak of "the ruinous force of the will" which .enables men to believe what they want to believe. Dr. Arnold probably rather over-stimulated the will of his more sensitive disciples, and in the reaction, they lost almost as much as they had gained, though for the ordinary pachyder- matous British schoolboy Dr. Arnold's influence was the best tonic that could have been applied. But what Dr. Arnold failed to teach was intellectual humility. In some of the stronger minds which felt his noble and chivalric enthusiasm, he inspired too great a trust in their own judgments. That is why, as it seems to us, so many of his disciples throw off with the greatest equanimity all the accessories, as they think them, of our Lord's teaching, and discover that that teaching was sheathed deep in error from the very day of the Crucifixion. Revelation, indeed, in the bands of these confident persons, needs all sorts of human reflecting and refracting and sifting agencies before it can be trusted as divine teaching, so that the external institution which Christ left in the world is valuable chiefly as testimony to what his teaching was not, rather than as to what it was. Could any group who had learned a lesson of true humility have transmitted so strange a lesson as this ? Dr. Arnold's power to reform the whole tenor of our school life, was partly due, no doubt, to this grand self-confidence and imperious volition. But we doubt whether his intellectual influence over the convictions of posterity was at all as invigorating as his moral influence over education. He was a great practical reformer, but he was too self-confident to give the right key-note to a school of :religious thinkers and critics.