And yet that record, as they wrote it, is, according to Arnold, brimful of errors, both in fact and in interpretation; and the Church, which has preserved their written tradition, and kept it concurrently with her own oral tradition, has fallen into enormous and fundamental delusion about those "words" and that "life." "Christianity is immortal; it has eternal truth, inexhaustible value, a boundless future. But our popular religion at present conceives the birth, ministry, and death of Christ as altogether steeped in prodigy, brimful of miracles—and miracles do not happen."
The fact that, in the preface to the popular edition of Literature and Dogma, he italicized those last words would appear to show that he attached some special, almost "thaumaturgical," value to them. Miracles do not happen. It has been justly observed that any man, woman, or child that ever lived might have said this, and have caused no startling sensation. But when Arnold uttered these words, emphasized them, and seemed to base his case against the Catholic creed upon them, it behoved his disciples to ponder them, and to enquire if, and how far, they were true.
As far as we know, there never was but one human being to whom they proved overwhelming, and he is a character in a popular work of fiction. "Miracles do not happen" broke the bruised reed of the Rev. Robert Elsmere's faith. That long-legged weakling, with his auburn hair and "boyish innocence of mood," and sweet ignorance of the wicked world, went down, it will be remembered, like a ninepin before the assaults of a sceptical squire who had studied in Germany. "A great creed, with the testimony of eighteen centuries at its back, could not find an articulate word to say in its defence.... What weapons the Rector wielded for it, what strokes he struck, has not even in a single line been recorded."[50]
A happily-conceived picture—was it in Punch?—represented the Rector on his knees before the Squire, ejaculating, with clasped hands, "Pray, pray, don't mention another German author, or I shall be obliged to resign my living." However, the ruthless Squire persisted; and Elsmere apparently read Literature and Dogma, and, when he came to "Miracles do not happen" he resigned; threw up his Orders, and founded what Arnold would have called "a hole-and-corner" religion of his own.
Well, but, it may be urged, Elsmere is after all only a fictitious character, taken from a novel purporting, as Bishop Creighton said, to describe a man who once was a Christian and ceased to be one, but really describing a man who never was a Christian, and eventually found it out. This, of course, is true, but it must be presumed that the Reverend Robert is not absolutely the creature of a vivid imagination, but stands for some real men and women who, in actual life, came under the author's observation. If that be so, we must admit that Arnold's dogma about Miracles had a practical effect upon certain minds. An Elsmere of a different type—a flippant Elsmere, if such a portent could be conceived—might have answered that, if miracles happened, they would not be miracles; in other words, that events of frequent occurrence are not called miracles; and that it belongs to the idea of a miracle that it is a special and signal suspension of the Divine Law, for a great purpose and a great occasion. If, again, Robert, eschewing flippancy, had retired on abstract theory, he might have said that an event so unique and so transcendent as the assumption of human nature by Eternal God seems to demand, in the fitness of things, a method of entry into the material world, and a method of departure from it, wholly and strikingly dissimilar to the established order—in common parlance, miraculous. Answers conceived in these two senses—some rough and popular and declamatory, some learned and argumentative and scientific—appeared in great numbers. "Grave objections are alleged against the book.... Its conclusions about the meaning of the term God, and about man's knowledge of God, are severely condemned; strong objections are taken to our view of the Bible-documents in general, to our account of the Canon of the Gospels, to our estimate of the Fourth Gospel." To these criticisms Arnold might have added one yet more cogent. It was felt by many of his readers, and even by some of his most attached disciples, that the "sinuous, easy, unpolemical method" which he vaunted, and which he applied so happily to criticism of books and life, was not grave enough, or cogent enough, when applied to the criticism of Religion. From first to last his method was arbitrary. Ἁντός ἔφα—the Master said it. This was excellent when he criticised literature. To say that a verse of Macaulay's was painful, or a line of Francis Newman's hideous, was well within his province. To say that one author wrote in the Grand Style and that another showed the Note of Provinciality—that also was his right. To pronounce that a passage from Sophocles was religious poetry of the highest and most edifying type,[51] whereas the Eternal Power was displeased by "such doggerel hymns as
Sing Glory, Glory, Glory, to the Great God Triune,"
this again was all very well; for matters of this kind do not admit of argument and proof. But, when it comes to handling Religion, this arbitrary method—this innate and unquestioning claim to settle what is good or bad, true or false—provokes rebellion. No one was more severe than Arnold on the folly of Puritanism in founding its doctrine of Justification on isolated texts borrowed from St. Paul; yet no one was more confident than he that man's whole conception of God could be safely based on the fact that at a certain period of their history the Jews took to expressing God by a word which signifies "Eternal." "Rejoice and give thanks," "Rejoice evermore," are certainly texts of Holy Writ; but he seems to think that, by merely quoting them, he has abrogated all the sterner side of the Bible's teaching about human life and destiny. An even more curious instance of literary self-confidence may be cited from his treatment of the Lord's commission to the Apostles. "It is extremely improbable that Jesus should ever have charged his Apostles to 'baptize all nations in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.'" But "He may perfectly well have said: 'Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted; whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained.'" The one formula seems to Arnold anachronistic and unlikely, the other perfectly natural. This is all very interesting and may be very true; but it is too dogmatic to be convincing. In such a case one may respectfully cry out that Letters are overstepping their province; and that one man's sense of fitness, style, and literary likelihood is not sufficient warrant for discrediting a well-tested and established document.
Yet, after all, documents, however well-tested and established, are not the backbone of the Christian religion. It may well be that to minds inured from infancy to the worship of the letter; to believers in "the Bible and the Bible only" as the ground of their religion; Arnold's solvent methods and free handling of the sacred text were alarming and revolutionary. But they fell harmless on the minds which had long schooled themselves in the Christian tradition; which took the Bible from the Church, not the Church from the Bible; and which realized that what had sufficed for the life of Christians before the Canon was contemplated would suffice again, even if every book contained in the Canon were resolved into mere literature.
Yet again, a criticism brought freely and justly against his biblical disputations was that in his appeal to Letters and to what he conceived to be human nature, he overlooked the at least equally important appeal to History. He seems indeed to have avoided coming to close quarters with the historical defenders of the Christian Creed. It was easy enough to poke fun at Archbishop Thomson, Bishop Wilberforce, and Bishop Ellicott; Mr. Moody, and the Rev. W. Cattle, and the clergymen who write to the Guardian. But Bishop Lightfoot he left severely alone, with Bishop Westcott and Dr. Sanday and students of the same authority; and he would probably have justified his neglect of their contentions by saying, as he had said twenty years before, in his light and airy fashion, that "it was not possible for a clergyman to treat these matters satisfactorily."