LITERATURE AND DOGMA.1 Now, into the originals of faith, Yours, mine, Miranda's, no inquiry here. How substitute thing meant for thing expressed? Men call their rope, their real compulsive power? And demonstration made of what belief Has moved believer-were the consequence Reward at all? Would each man straight deduce Conformable? believe and unbelieve According as your true thus disengaged From all his heap of False-called reason first? So Browning writes in his last poem, with half a glance, one might suppose, at Matthew Arnold's last book, then coming oue by chapters in the Cornhill Magazine. The great dramatic poet declines the task as an impossible one, when he is asked to analyze a man's faith into the two elements that compose it-the principles and convictions that are rightly felt necessary to his spiritual existence and growth, and those inferences and opinions which every one is liable to confound with the former. Browning has looked so deeply into human nature, has found the subject so complex and perplexing, has such a keen sense of the delicacy of the question, that he gives it up as insoluble. He would not dare to 1 Literature and Dogma: An Essay toward a better Apprehension of the Bible. By Matthew Arnold, D. C. L., etc. Pp. 316. Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co. Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger. take up the series of beliefs that exist in the mind of an Italian of the lowest class, for instance, and say, "This is a wholesome grasp of eternal truth, and exerts a healthy influence on the man's life and character; but that other is mere vacuous superstition and dead inanity. Some anatomists who have studied very closely the complexities of the human frame, tell us that if we knew how dangerous the operation of walking is, we would hardly dare to walk. A hesitation born of equally extensive knowledge, seems to inspire Browning in the passage we have quoted. But the problem which Browning declines is that which Arnold attempts. Nor is he the first in modern times that has attempted it; only his methods and his tests are his own. A large part of the writings of the late Prof. F. D. Maurice are taken up with exactly the same problem-how shall we distinguish between what was vital and essential conviction in men's beliefs, and what was mere opinion and hearsay? The same is true of the best writers of Mr. Maurice's school-Rev. T. Hancock, George McDonald and others. Indeed, the wide-spread study of the history of opinion and belief that has grown up within the last twenty years, has made this sort of analysis a necessity to any one who is not content to pursue the study in a mechanical and unfruitful way, who is really anxious to find what vital bond unites the apparently contradictory parts of the same system-what logical necessity led to new developments in the disciples from which the master would have shrunk. Mr. Arnold takes up for his study the Protestant Bible, believing that it is a main-stay and prop of public and private virtue. He is aghast at the laxity of principle that threatens modern society; he looks to a new interest in the old book—a broad, popular and unprofessional interest-as one of the most hopeful instruments of reform. But the Bible has not had fair play in the hands of its expositors; they have interpreted it as dogma, as if it were a Koran, in which every word were of equal and vital emphasis. Therefore the spirit of the age, the Zeitgeist, is bidding good-bye to the Bible. Negative expositors, like Colenso-as hard and dogmatic in their way as the orthodox in theirs-are busy furnishing the Zeitgeist with excuses for so doing. A third school of exposition, one that shall show men which of the old book's words are emphatic and which are merely of temporal import, which represent the spirit, and which only the letter, has become a necessity; and culture is its watchward and Matthew Arnold is its prophet. Those who have made themselves acquainted with the best that is known and has been said in the world, will come to this task with a power of insight and discrimination that is wanting in ordinary men, notably wanting in all but a few of the recognized custodians and interpreters of the Bible. From the method we pass to some of the results, and most readers, we think, will feel that Mr. Arnold does indeed "Reduce Quantities to exact their opposites, Value to zero," and only a few will discern in him the power to "then bring zero back To value of supreme predominance." The emphatic Old Testament word in his view is righteousness. The book is filled with the word and the thought......No people ever felt so strongly as......the Hebrew people that conduct is three-fourths of our life, and its largest concern; no people ever felt so strongly that succeeding, going right, hitting the mark in this great concern, was the way of peace, the highest possible satisfaction." But while this is so "the Living God" is not in Mr. Arnold's view one of the emphatic Hebrew phrases. There is, indeed, an element in the phrase which is emphatic-" the not ourselves," to which "the very great part in righteousness belongs." "The Hebrews named that power, out of themselves, which pressed upon their spirit: The Eternal...... They meant the eternal righteous, who loveth righteousness. They had dwelt upon the thought of conduct and right and wrong, till the not ourselves, which is in us and around us, became to them adorable, eminently and altogether as a power which makes for righteousness, which makes for it unchangeably and eternally, and is therefore called: The Eternal." This is the pith of the excellency of the Old Testament, and not of it alone. The New Testament only repeats that same principle, repeats it in an age when men had ceased to remember that the promises were made to righteousness, and ascribed them to the literal seed of Abraham. Jesus of Nazareth cast aside the accretion of false tradition, proclaimed that the promise to Abraham's seed meant to those who did the works of Abraham. But he possessed a moral insight and a skill in teaching that far surpassed that of the prophets, while it did not prevent his teaching from being as grossly misconstrued as that of the old prophets had been, by traditions and additions of a non-ethical sort. This is but a brief and meager summing up of the positive part of the book, but it contains, we think, all the essential points. We cannot think the result at all satisfactory. To reduce the Bible to the refined and spiritual stoicism of an Epictetus is hardly the way to commend it to to our philistinish century. It at least provokes the questions, Why did Epictetus accomplishs nothing? Why did this distorted, unphilosophic Christianity of Tertullian, Origen, and their contemporaries carry the day? Certainly Epictetus was a better representative of the teaching of Isaiah and of Christ than they were, if Mr. Arnold has understood the Bible. But he took no hold on men's consciences; he changed no lives from worse to better; they actually did and their successors do. Nor again can we regard Mr. Arnold as true to the pledge that he gives of using culture simply as the instrument of an inductive study of the Bible. He everywhere gives us the impression that he has come to the study of the record with a whole back-burden of preconceived ideas of what the Bible ought to be, and must be. How else could he have eliminated the Hebrew expression, "The Lord liveth," as unimportant? for his analysis into two elements is a real elimination of the essential life of the phrase. 'But," says Mr. Arnold, "the element of personality and life cannot be the important one here, for it is a mere hypothesis incapable of verification. An hypothesis cannot have been at any time the living and actuating conviction of the Hebrew people." In that given reason is the deepest ground of his difference from the theology of the whole Bible. The Old and the New Testament both continually assume and repeatedly assert the possibility of a man's attaining to a knowledge of God as actual and real, though not as complete and exhaustive, as that which he possesses of his friend. They do not confine that possibility to extraordinary theophanies, visions of the night, and prophetic ecstasy. They speak of it as possible to men of the humblest and meanest powers of mind. Our Paleyites and Mansellites teach, indeed, the direct contrary of all "This is life eter this, but they cannot explain away the saying, nal, that they may know Thee, the only true God." Nor will they ever account for the hold that such mystical writers as a Kempis and Guyon have over those who have been trained in a school the most different. Mr. Froude shall explain what we mean, by his parallel between Luther and Erasmus: "You will mistake me if think I repre you sent Erasmus as a man without conscience, or belief in God and goodness. But in Luther that belief was a certainty; in Erasmus it was only a high probability, and the difference between the two is not merely great, it is infinite. In Luther it was the root; in Erasmus it was the flower. In Luther it was the first principle of life; in Erasmus it was an influence which might be taken away, and yet leave the world a very tolerable and habitable place.... Erasmus considered that for the vulgar a lie might be as good as the truth, and often better. A lie ascertained to be a lie, to Luther was deadly poison, a poison to him and a poison to all who meddled with it.” Of these two men, it was Erasmus that represented, in the sixteenth century, the spirit in which and the methods by which Mr. Arnold would play physician to the spiritual sickness of the nineteenth. Which did the most to advance the cause which he himself has at heart? We are at no loss for an answer; he gave it a year ago in the Academy, in reviewing a work by M. Renan, in which the refined Frenchman declared that he rather enjoyed than found fault with the existence of brilliant dissoluteness in Paris. Will Mr. Arnold tell us, if culture is to do so much for us, why this, the most illustrious of its representatives in France—a man personally of blameless life, a man profoundly conversant with the writings of the Old and New Testaments, a man therefore exceptionally likely to be aroused to moral earnestness in the way in which Mr. Arnold hopes to see us all aroused-could make a declaration so utterly out of harmony with the whole spirit of the Hebrew literature? Was it not a surrender of the whole case, "in re Culture vs. Dogma," when Mr. Arnold held up Luther (with some specified exceptions to his opinions, to be sure), as an honored and honorable contrast to Renan. But if culture and literature be not the panaceas of our century's spiritual diseases, have we no other alternative than dogma? |