It is now time to enquire what practical effect he produced by all this writing (and a good deal which followed it in the same sense) on the religious thought of his time. This is a question which, in the absence of any clear or general testimony, one can only answer by the light of one's own experience. The present writer can aver that, so far as his own personal knowledge goes, the strange case of Robert Elsmere was a unique instance. He has, of course, known plenty of people to whom, alas! revealed Religion—the accepted Faith of the Church and the Gospel—was a tale of no meaning, which they regarded either with blank indifference or with bitter and furious hostility. But, in all these cases, dissent from the Christian creed depended upon negations far deeper than "Miracles do not happen." It depended on a stark incapacity to conceive the ideas of God, of permitted evil, of sin, its consequences and its remedy, and of life after death. Where there was the capacity to conceive these mysteries, men were not troubled by the minor questions of miracle, prophecy, and textual research. To use an illustration which the present writer has used elsewhere, they were not shaken by Robert Elsmere, not confirmed by Lux Mundi. Still less were they agitated by the literary dogmaticism of Matthew Arnold. Many people disliked his style, his methods, his illustrations; and, not knowing the man, disliked him also. But, as he justly observed, if he had written as these objectors wished him to write, no one would have read him; so he went on in his "sinuous, easy, unpolemical" way; and the people who disliked him closed their ears, and "flocked all the more eagerly to Messrs. Moody and Sankey."
Mr. Gladstone wrote in 1895—"It is very difficult to keep one's temper in dealing with M. Arnold when he touches on religious matters. His patronage of a Christianity fashioned by himself is to me more offensive and trying than rank unbelief."
But then again there were those—and we should hope the great majority—who, whether they knew the man or not, loved his temper, admired his methods, and found no more difficulty in detaching what was good from what was bad in his teaching, than he himself found in the case of his master, Wordsworth. A Catholic priest, ministering formerly in the Roman and now in the English Church, thus describes the help which he gained from Arnold at a time of distress and transition. "That I held to any sort of Christianity, and continued to use and enjoy the Bible, I owe entirely to Matthew Arnold. I began to read him in 1882; first his prose, and then his verse. For several years I read him over, and over, and over again with growing delight and profit; until, so far as I was able, I understood something of his mind and methods. He taught me how to think, and how to write. He undoubtedly saved me from leaving the Papal Church a dulled and blank materialist, thoroughly and violently anti-Christian; and his gentle influence tended me through the next few years, until I was mellowed for the process of reconstruction."[56]
This is a fine tribute to all that was best and most characteristic in his teaching. Beyond doubt, by his insistence on the relation of Letters to Religion, he helped many young men to read their Bibles with better understanding and keener appreciation; and enabled them that are without to enter for the first time into the spirit and attractiveness of the Christian ideal. Not only so, but men established in age, position, and orthodoxy, felt and acknowledged his helpfulness. When he delivered an address on "The Church of England" to a gathering of clergy at Sion College, he tells us that "Clergyman on clergyman turned on the Chairman" (who had scented heresy), "and said they agreed with me far more than with him." A divine so profoundly Evangelical as Bishop Thorold larded his sermons and charges with extracts from Arnold's prose and verse. In 1893 Arnold dined with Archbishop Benson, and "thought it a gratifying marvel, considering what things I have published"; but the marvel was of such frequent occurrence that it had almost ceased to be marvellous. That this was so was due, no doubt, in great measure to the charm of his character and conversation. It was not easy for any one who knew him to take serious offence at what he wrote. Just as Coleridge's metaphysics were said by a friend to be "only his fun," so Arnold's theology was regarded by his admirers as part of his playfulness. It was difficult to disentangle what he really wished to teach from his jokes about the hangings of the Celestial Council-Chamber; "Willesden beyond Trent"; "Change Alley and Alley Change"; Professor Birks, "his brows crowned with myrtle," going in procession to the Temple of Aphrodite; the Duke of Somerset "running into the strong tower" of Deism, and thinking himself "safe" there from further questionings. This method of illustration threw an air of comedy over the theme which it illustrated; and, if the criticism failed to disturb faith in Biblical theology, the critic had only himself to thank.
Another element in the satisfaction with which dignitaries and clergymen came to regard him was the fact that he was so definitely a supporter of the Church of England. To the principle of Established Churches, as part of the wider principle of extending everywhere the scope of the State, he was always friendly; but he felt the difficulty of maintaining them where, as in Scotland, they had nothing to show except "a religious service which is perhaps the most dismal performance ever invented by man," and a theology shared by all the non-established bodies round about. No such difficulty appeared in the case of the Church of England, with its historic claim, its seemly worship, its distinctive doctrine; so of that Church as by law established he was the consistent defender. Towards ugliness, hideousness, rawness, whether manifested in life or in letters, he was always implacable; and this sentiment no doubt accounts for much of his hostility to Dissent. Margate was, in his eyes, a "brick-and-mortar image of English Protestantism, representing it in all its prose, all its uncomeliness—let me add, all its salubrity." When criticising the proposal to let Dissenters bury their dead with their own rites in the National Church-yards, he likened the dissenting Service to a reading from Eliza Cook, and the Church's Service to a reading from Milton, and protested against the Liberal attempt to "import Eliza Cook into a public rite." He even was bold enough to cite his friend Mr. John Morley as secretly sharing this repugnance to Eliza Cook in a public rite. "Scio, rex Agrippa, quia credis. He is keeping company with his Festus Chamberlain and his Drusilla Collings, and cannot openly avow the truth; but in his heart he consents to it."
For the beauty, the poetry, the winningness of Catholic worship and Catholic life Arnold had the keenest admiration. "The need for beauty is a real and ever rapidly growing need in man; Puritanism cannot satisfy it, Catholicism and the Church of England can." He dwelt with delighted interest on Eugénie de Guerin's devotional practices, her happy Christmas in the soft air of Languedoc, her midnight Mass, her beloved Confession. On the Mass itself no one has written more sympathetically, although he disavowed the fundamental doctrine on which the Mass is founded. "Once admit the miracle of the 'atoning sacrifice,' once move in this order of ideas, and what can be more natural and beautiful than to imagine this miracle every day repeated, Christ offered in thousands of places, everywhere the believer enabled to enact the work of redemption and unite himself with the Body whose sacrifice saves him?"
In truth he had a strong sense, uncommon in Protestants, of Worship as distinct from Prayer—of Worship as the special object of a religious assembly. When he gave a Prayer-book to a child, he wrote on the flyleaf: "We have seen His star in the East, and are come to worship Him." "In religion," he said, "there are two parts: the part of thought and speculation, and the part of worship and devotion.... It does not help me to think a thing more clearly, that thousands of other people are thinking the same; but it does help me to worship with more devotion, that thousands of other people are worshipping with me. The connexion of common consent, antiquity, public establishment, long-used rites, national edifices, is everything for religious worship." He quotes with admiration his favourite Joubert: "Just what makes worship impressive is its publicity, its external manifestation, its sound, its splendour, its observance, universally and visibly holding its sway through all the details both of our outward and of our inward life."
"Worship," he says, "should have in it as little as possible of what divides us, and should be as much as possible a common and public act."
Again he quotes Joubert: "The best prayers are those which have nothing distinct about them, and which are thus of the nature of simple adoration."