DR. ARNOLD.
3.
I sat up till half-past two this morning reading Dr. Arnold’s “Life and Letters,” and have my soul full of him to-day.
On the whole I cannot say that the perusal of this admirable book has changed any notion in my mind, or added greatly to my stock of ideas. There was no height of inspiration, or eloquence, or power, to which I looked up; no profound depth of thought or feeling into which I looked down; no new lights; no new guides; no absolutely new aspects of things human or spiritual.
On the other hand, I never read a book of the kind with a more harmonious sense of pleasure and approbation,—if the word be not from me presumptuous. While I read page after page, the mind which was unfolded before me seemed to me a brother’s mind—the spirit, a kindred spirit. It was the improved, the elevated, the enlarged, the enriched, the every-way superior reflection of my own intelligence, but it was certainly that. I felt it so from beginning to end. Exactly the reverse was the feeling with which I laid down the Life and Letters of Southey. I was instructed, amused, interested; I profited and admired; but with the man Southey I had no sympathies: my mind stood off from his; the poetical intellect attracted, the material of the character repelled me. I liked the embroidery, but the texture was disagreeable, repugnant. Now with regard to Dr. Arnold, my entire sympathy with the character, with the material of the character, did not extend to all its manifestations. I liked the texture better than the embroidery;—perhaps, because of my feminine organisation.
Nor did my admiration of the intellect extend to the acceptance of all the opinions which emanated from it; perhaps because from the manner these were enunciated, or merely touched upon (in letters chiefly), I did not comprehend clearly the reasoning on which they may have been founded. Perhaps, if I had done so, I must have respected them more, perhaps have been convinced by them; so large, so candid, so rich in knowledge, and apparently so logical, was the mind which admitted them.
And yet this excellent, admirable man, seems to have feared God, in the common-place sense of the word fear. He considered the Jews as out of the pale of equality; he was against their political emancipation from a hatred of Judaism. He subscribed to the Athanasian Creed, which stuck even in George the Third’s orthodox throat. He believed in what Coleridge could not admit, in the existence of the spirit of evil as a person. He had an idea that the Church of God may be destroyed by an Antichrist; he speaks of such a consummation as possible, as probable, as impending; as if any institution really from God could be destroyed by an adverse power!—and he thought that a lawyer could not be a Christian.
4.
Certain passages filled me with astonishment as coming from a churchman, particularly what he says of the sacraments (vol. ii. pp. 75. 113.); and in another place, where he speaks of “the pestilent distinction between clergy and laity;” and where he says, “I hold that one form of Church government is exactly as much according to Christ’s will as another.” And in another place he speaks of the Anglican Church (with reference to Henry VIII. as its father, and Elizabeth as its foster-mother), as “the child of regal and aristocratical selfishness and unprincipled tyranny, who has never dared to speak boldly to the great, but has contented herself with lecturing the poor;” but he forgot at the moment the trial of the bishops in James’s time, and their noble stand against regal authority.