"Catholic worship," he said, "is likely, however modified, to survive as the general worship of Christians, because it is the worship which, in a sphere where poetry is permissible and natural, unites most of the elements of poetry." And again, "Unity and continuity in public religious worship are a need of human nature, an eternal aspiration of Christendom. A Catholic Church transformed is, I believe, the Church of the future."
His speculations on that future are interesting and, naturally, not always consistent. In 1879 he writes to Sir Mountstuart Grant-Duff: "Perhaps we shall end our days in the tail of a return-current of popular religion, both ritual and dogmatic." In 1880 he sees a great future for Catholicism, which, by virtue of its superior charm and poetry, will "endure while all the Protestant sects (amongst which I do not include the Church of England) dissolve and perish." In 1881 he seemed to apprehend the return to Westminster Abbey, after "Wisdom's too short reign," of—
Folly revived, re-furbish'd sophistries,
And pullulating rites externe and vain.
In the last autumn of his life he wrote to M. Fontanès—a friend whose acquaintance he first made over St. Paul and Protestantism—
"Your letter has reached me here (Ottery St. Mary), where I am staying with Lord Coleridge, the Lord Chief Justice, who is a grand-nephew of the poet. He loves literature, and, being a great deal richer than his grand-uncle, or than poets in general, has built a library from which I now write, and on which I wish that you could feast your eyes with me.... The Church Congress has just been held, and shows as usual that the clergy have no idea of the real situation; but indeed the conservatism and routine in religion are such in England that the line taken by the clergy cannot be wondered at. Nor are the conservatism and routine a bad thing, perhaps, in such a matter; but the awakening will one day come, and there will be much confusion. Have you looked at Tolstoi's books on religion: in French they have the titles Ma Religion, Ma Confession, Que Faire? The first of these has been well translated, and has excited much attention over here; perhaps it is from this side, the socialist side that the change is likely to come: the Bible will be retained, but it will be said, as Tolstoi says, that its true, socialistic teaching has been overlooked, and attention has been fixed on metaphysical dogmas deduced from it, which are at any rate, says Tolstoi, secondary. He does not provoke discussion by denying or combating them; he merely relegates them to a secondary position.
And now that we have enquired into Arnold's influence on theology, it is, perhaps, proper to ask what he himself believed. His faith seems to have been, by a curious paradox, far stronger on the Christian than on the Theistic side. "A Stream of Tendency" can never satisfy the idea of God, as ordinary humanity conceives it. It is not in human nature to love a stream of tendency, or worship it, or ask boons of it; or to credit it with powers of design, volition, or creation. A prayer beginning "Stream" would sound as odd as Wordsworth's ode beginning "Spade."[57]
But he had, as we have already seen, an unending admiration—a homage which did not stop far short of worship—for the character and teaching of Jesus Christ; and he placed salvation in conformity to that teaching, as it is explained by St. Paul. And this meant death to sin; the abrogation and annulment of bad habits and tendencies; resurrection with Christ to the higher life which He taught us to pursue. The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. He would have allowed no antithesis between the two halves of the text, but would have taught that the eternal welfare of man consisted in obeying the Law, receiving the Grace, and pursuing the Truth.
Nothing more dogmatic than this could safely be put forward as representing his theology; but, though not dogmatic, his mind was intensely ecclesiastical. His contempt for individual whims and fancies, his love of corporate action and collective control, operated as powerfully in the religious as in the social sphere. He admired and clave to the Church of England because it was not, like Miss Cobbe's new religion and the British College of Health, the product of an individual fancy, setting out to make all things new on a plan of its own. The Church of England, whether it could theologically be called "Catholic" or not, was certainly "the continuous and historical Church of this country." In 1869 he praised his friend Temple, afterwards Archbishop, for "showing his strong Church feeling, and sense of the value and greatness of the historic development of Christianity, of which the Church is the expression." It was the National organ for promoting Righteousness and Perfection by means of Culture and for diffusing Sweetness and Light. In the last year of his life he wrote to Mr. Lionel Tollemache: "I consider myself, to adopt your very good expression, a Liberal Anglican; and I think the times are in favour of our being allowed so to call ourselves."
As regards differences of opinion inside the Church, he saw no harm in them. He held that the Church must maintain Episcopacy as a matter of historical development, and as "its link with the past—its share in the beauty and the poetry and the charm for the imagination," which belong to Catholicism. This being so, the "latitudinarianism of the Broad Churchmen" who wished to entice the Dissenters into the Church was "quite illusory" so long as opposition to Episcopacy was one of the main tenets of Nonconformity. But he thought that the Church was likely before long to get rid of the Athanasian Creed and the Thirty-nine Articles; and he urged that, as no one could enforce belief in such doctrines as the Real Presence, Apostolic Succession, and Priestly Absolution, Churchmen who rejected these could quite comfortably remain in the Church, side by side with others who accepted them.