MATTHEW ARNOLD'S THEOLOGY.
[TO IRS EDITOR OD THZ " SPTCTATOR."1
Stn,—Now that Mr. Gladstone's name is so much before the world it may be timely to make some remarks arising from what has been recently reported respecting his view of Matthew Arnold's much-debated definition of the Godhead.
Mr. Tollemache, in his interesting "Talks with Mr. Glad- stone," tells us that his friend "seemed to dissent from that definition," but he does not say why. The dissent does not appear to have been at all vehement, or like that which, on another occasion, provoked the censure of "sheer nonsense." But it is not. I think, unlikely that some such judgment may have been in Mr. Gladstone's mind. "God is the Eternal not ourselves that [or which] makes for righteousness." May not Mr. Gladstone, with many others, have taken this to mean that God is to be regarded not as a person but as a kind of self-originating moral power,—" a stream of [moral] tendency" which, without guidance by mind or exercise of will, calls forth righteousness automatically as the rain does verdure or the sun blossom? Whether or not there is a Creator—an intelligent Being, a supernatural Author—to whom this agency owes existence is presumed by that popular view to be left by Arnold as, at beat, an open question. He is supposed to imply that the utmost which man, with all his searchings, can find out is that such an agency—not agent—there actually is, but that its source as good is not less inscrutable than is confessedly the origin of evil. He is conceived to intimate that if we must have a God this thing is all that we can in any way obtain. It is imagined that he assumes a principle which would require us to transpose such representations as "God is light" or "God is love" into "Light is God" and "Love is God," and so introduce into our theology a complete polytheism of divine attributes,—" gods many and lords many" indeed. Mr. Gladstone might have been expected to treat these notions much more severely than he seems to have done, and to have branded them as "sheer nonsense."
Such an interpretation of the dictum is, no doubt, due to Arnold's having used " that " or " which' for his relative pro- noun instead of the one pertaining to persons alone, and I will endeavour to show that in so doing he spoke in strict accord- ance with the Catholic Creed. But I will take the words in question in their order.
"The Eternal,"—this, like the "art in heaven" of the Lord's Prayer, lifts the thought at once into the sphere and state of which it is written that there and then "time shall be no longer." It carries us into the all-embracing "Now" of an eye and a mind to which past, present, and future are equally and simultaneously open. "The Eternal," no doubt, is only an adjective, and might be translated by Tb esiLsios as well as by O ridnuoc, but, like "the Almighty," it is an elliptic adjective which not poetry alone but the purest prose does not hesitate to admit for designat- ing the very God.
"Not ourselves" are words which, in their context, have a singularly evangelical significance. A caution may be read in them alike against pantheislo philosophy and Pelagian heresy—an emphatic assertion of the fundamental verity, upon which all essentially Gospel teaching lays the utmost stress, that fallen man cannot of himself work out and establish a true righteousness—a confession that for that gift he can look only to the grace of "the Eternal."
The "that" or the "which" is responsible, as I believe, for the whole misunderstanding. Now the divine names are repeatedly followed in the English Bible, by what may be called the indefinite relative. The example most ready at hand is in the Lord's Prayer,—" Our Father which." Substitute in Arnold's definition a synonym for "the Eternal." Read instead "the Godhead," or, better for my argument, "the Trinity," a name purely of Church coinage. The personal relative is never applied to either of those designations, and to the latter, in particular, no one will maintain that it ought to be applied on the demand of unexceptionable orthodoxy. It may fairly be argued that if ea applied it would put too much, if not entirely, out of eight the triad of the Christian Godhead, and, by unduly pressing its unity into notice, would give a Sabellian
taint to the title expressly designed to deny that heresy, the- doctrine of the Unity being sufficiently preserved by the singular verb "makes." Therefore, as guarding "the Eternal" against that taint, " that " or "which" seems pre- ferable to "who" for its relative.
On the words "makes for righteousness" it may be- enough to observe that, while they recognise the end and aim of God's working "for us men and for our salvation," they imply that His purpose can be. and is, frustrated, and so are calculated to remind us of our responsibility for the part we bear in hindering Him. At the same time, they may fairly suggest the assurance that righteousness being so supremely His work, must in the end prevail over all opposition, so that peace, quietness, and assurance shall be, as He is, eternal.
In offering this vindication I believe that I am simply doing an act of justice. In Mr. Tollemache's reminiscences he bears this testimony to Arnold: "He clung to the Church as the symbol of his spiritual life ; he was less of a Theist and more of a Christian," meaning perhaps, than the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, to whom he likens him. Mr. Gladstone then says : "I understand that Matthew Arnold considered himself so far an Anglican as to take part in the discussions at Sion College ; " to which "T." rejoins : " I know that he used to take the Sacrament." Thus much, Sir, I also know, and although I have no concord with pure Arnoldism in either of its three forms, but am an old-fashioned High Churchman, I must express my conviotion that Matthew was much too honest and true a man to join in the Eucharistio worship and " Communion " of the Anglican Church if he believed God to be nothing more than "a stream of moral tendency which, &c.,"—in other words, if by his definition he intended to cast so much as a doubt upon the personality of "the Eternal that makes for righteousness."—I am, Sir, dm, J. E. KEMPB.
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