MR. ARNOLD'S LAY SERMON.
MR. ARNOLD'S lay sermon to "the sacrificed classes" at Whitechapel contrasts doubly with the pulpit sermons which we too often hear. It is real where' these sermons are unreal, and frankly unreal where these sermons are real. It does honestly warn the people to whom it was addressed, of the special danger to which "the sacrificed classes " are exposed, whenever they in their turn get the upper-hand, the danger of simply turning the tables on the great possessing and aspiring classes. " If the sacrificed classes," be said, " under the influence of hatred, cupidity, desire of change, destroy, in order to possess and enjoy in their turn, their work, too, will be idolatrous, and the old work will continue to stand for the pre- sent, or at any rate their new work will not take its place." It mast be work done in a new spirit, not in the spirit of hatred or cupidity, or eagerness to enjoy and appropriate the time of others, which can alone stand the test of tune and judgment. So far, Mr. Arnold was much more
real than too many of our clerical preachers. He warned his hearers against a temptation which he knew would be stirring constantly in their hearts, and not against abstract
temptations which he had no reason to think would have any special significance to any of his audience.
On the other hand, if he were more real in what was addressed to his particular audience than pulpit-preachers often are, he resorted once more, with his usual hardened indifference to the meaning of words and the principles of true literature, to that practice of debasing the coinage of religions language, and using great sayings in a new and washed-out sense of his own, of which pulpit-preachers are seldom guilty. This practice of Mr. Arnold's is the only great set-off against the brilliant services he has rendered to English literature, but it is one which we should not find it easy to condemn too strongly. Every one knows how, in various books of his, Mr. Arnold has tried to " verify " the teaching of the Bible, while depriving the name of God of all personal meaning ; to verify the Gospel of Christ, while denying that Christ had any message to us from a world beyond our own; and even,—wildest enterprise of all,—so to ration- alise the strictly theological language of St. John as to rob it of all its theological significance. Well, we do not charge this offence on Mr. Arnold as in any sense whatever an attempt to play fast-and-loose with words ; for he has again and again confessed to all the world, with the explicitness and vigour which are natural to him, the precise drift of his enterprise. But we do charge it on Mr. Arnold as in the highest possible sense a great literary misdemeanour, that he has lent his high authority to the attempt to give to a great literature a pallid, faded, and artificial complexion, though, with his view of it, his duty obviously was to declare boldly that that literature teaches what is, in his opinion, false and superstitious, and deserves our admiration only as representing a singularly grand, though obsolete, stage in man's development. Mr. Arnold is as frank and honest as the day. But frank and honest as he is, his authority is not the less lent to a non-natural rendering of Scripture infinitely more intolerable than that non-natural interpretation of the Thirty-nine Articles which once brought down the wrath of the world of Protestants on the author of " Tract 90." In this Whitechapel lecture Mr. Arnold tells his hearers that in the "preternatural and
miraculous aspect " which the popular Christianity assumes Christianity is not solid or verifiable, but that there is another aspect of Christianity which is solid and verifiable, which aspect of it makes no appeal to a preternatural [i.e., supernatural] world at all. Then he goes on, after eulogising
Mr. Watts's pictures,—of one of which a great mosaic has been set up in Whitechapel as a memorial of Mr. Barnett's noble work there to remark that good as it is to bring home to " the less refined classes " the significance of Art and Beauty, it is none the less true that "whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again," and to suggest, of course, by implication, that there is a living water springing up to everlasting life, of which he who drinks shall never thirst. Then he proceeds thus :—
" No doubt the social sympathies, the feeling for Beauty, the plea- sure of Art, if left merely by themselves, if untouched by what is the deepest thing in human life—religion—are apt to become ineffectual and superficial. The art which Mr. Barnett bas done his best to make known to the people here, the art of men like Mr. Watts, the art manifested in works such as that which has just now been unveiled upon the walls of St. Jude's Church, has a deep and power- ful connection with religion. You have seen the mosaic, and have read, perhaps, the scroll which is attached to it. There is the figure of Time, a strong young man, fall of hope, energy, daring, and ad- venture, moving on to take possession of life ; and opposite to him there is that beautiful figure of Death, representing the breakings-off, the cuttings short, the baffling disappointments, the heart-piercing separations from which the fullest life and the most fiery energy can- not exempt us. Look at that strong and bold young man, that mournful figure must go hand in hand with him for ever. And those two figures, let us admit if you like, belong to Art. But who is that third figure whose scale weighs deserts, and who carries a sword of fire ? We are told again by the text printed on the scroll, 'The Eternal [the scroll, however, has 'the Lord '] is a God of Judgment ; blessed are all they that wait for him.' It is the figure of Judgment, and that figure, I say, belongs to religion. The text which explains the figure is taken from one of the Hebrew Prophets ; but an even more striking text is furnished us from that saying of the Founder of Christianity when he was about to leave the world, and to leave behind him his Disciples, who, so long as he lived, bad him always to cling to, and to do all their thinking for them. He told them that when be was gone they should find a new source of thought and feeling opening itself within them, and that this new source of thought and feeling should be a comforter to them, and that it should convince, he said, the world of many thins. Amongst other things, he said, it should convince the world that Judgment comes, and that the Prince of this world is judged. That is a text
which we shall do well to lay to heart, considering it with and along- side that text from the Prophet. More and more it is becoming mani- fest that the Prince of this world is really judged, that that Prince who is the perpetual ideal of selfishly possessing and enjoying, and of the worlds fashioned under the inspiration of this ideal, is judged. One world and another have gone to pieces because they were fashioned under the inspiration of this ideal, and that is a consoling and edify- ing thought."
Now, when we know, as Mr. Arnold wishes us all to know, that to him "the Eternal" means nothing more than that "stream of tendency, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness," that " Judgment " means nothing but the ultimate defeat which may await those who set themselves against this stream of ten- dency, if the stream of tendency be really as potent and as lasting as the Jews believed God to be, we do not think that the con- soling character of this text will be keenly felt by impartial minds. Further, we should remember that according to Mr. Arnold, when Christ told his disciples that the Comforter should " reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment ; of sin because they believe not on me, of righteousness because I go to the Father, and ye see me no more ; of judgment because the prince of this world is judged," we should under- stand this as importing, to those at least who agree with Mr. Arnold, only that, for some unknown reason, a new wave of feeling would follow Christ's death, which would give mankind a new sense of their unworthiness, a new vision of Christ's holiness, and a new confidence in the power of that "stream of tendency, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness," in which Christ's own personality would then be merged ; and further, that this powerful stream of tendency would probably sweep away all institutions not tending to righteousness but opposing an obstacle to that tendency. Well, all we can say is that, in watering-down in this way the language of the Bible, Mr. Arnold, if he is doing nothing else, is doing what lies in his power to extinguish the distinctive significance of a great literature. The whole power of that literature depends from beginning to end on the faith iu a Divine Being who holds the universe in his hand, whose will nothing can resist, who inspires the good, who punishes the evil, who judges kingdoms as he judges the hearts of men, and whose mind manifested in Christ promised to Christ's disciples that which his power alone availed to fulfil. To substitute for a faith such as this, a belief —to our minds the wildest in the world, and the least " verifiable "—that " a stream of tendency " effects all that the prophets ascribed to God, or, at least, so much of it as ever will be effected at all, and that Christ, by virtue merely of his com- plete identification with this stream of tendency, is accomplish- ing posthumously, without help from either Father, Son, or Spirit, all that he could have expected to accomplish through the personal agency of God, is to extract the kernel from the shell, and to ask us to accept the empty husk for the living grain. We are not reproaching Mr. Arnold for his scepticism. We are reproaching him as a literary man for trying to give currency in a debased form to language of which the whole power depends on its being used honestly in the original sense. "The Eternal" means one thing when it means the everlasting and supreme thought and will and life ; it is an expression utterly blank and dead when it means nothing but a select "stream of tendency" which is assumed, for no particular reason, to be constant, permanent, and victorious. " Living water " means one thing when it means the living stream of God's influence ; it has no salvation in it at all when it means only that which is the purest of the many tendencies in human life. The shadow of judgment means one thing when it is cast by the will of the supreme righteousness ; it has no solemnity in it when it expresses only the sanguine anticipation of human virtue. There is no reason on earth why Mr. Arnold should not water-down the teaching of the Bible to his own view of its residual meaning; but then, in the name of sincere literature, let him find his own language for it, and not dress up this feeble and superficial hopeful- ness of the nineteenth century in words which are undoubtedly stamped with an ardour and a peace for which his teaching can give us no sort of justification. " Solidity and verifica- tion," indeed ! Never was there a doctrine with less bottom in it and less pretence of verification than his ; but be that as it may, he must know, as well as we know, that his doctrine is as differ- ent from the doctrine of the Bible as the shadow is different from the substance. Has Mr. Arnold lately read Dr. Newman's great Oxford sermon on "Unreal Words "P If not, we wish he would refer to it again, and remember the warning addressed to those who "use great words and imitate the sentences of others," and who " fancy that those whom they imitate had as little meaning as themselves," or " perhaps contrive to think that they them- selves have a meaning adequate to their words." It is to us im- possible to believe that Mr. Arnold should have indulged such an illusion. He knows too well the difference between the groat faith which spoke in prophet and apostle, and the feeble faith which absorbs a drop or two of grateful moisture from a " stream of tendency " on the banks of which it weakly lingers. Mr. Arnold is really putting Literature,—of which he is so great a master,—to shame, when he travesties the lan- guage of the prophets, and the evangelists, and of our Lord himself, by using it to express the dwarfed convictions and withered hopes of modern rationalists who love to repeat the great words of the Bible, after they have given up the strong meaning of them as fanatical superstitions. Mr. Arnold's readings of Scripture are the spiritual assignats of English faith.
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