gone to pieces because they were fashioned under the inspiration of this ideal, and that is a consoling and edifying thought.” Now, when we know, as Mr. Arnold wishes us all to know, that to him “the Eternal” means nothing more than that “stream of tendency, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness,” that “Judgment” means nothing but the ultimate defeat which may await those who set themselves against this stream of tendency, if the stream of tendency be really as potent and as lasting as the Jews believed God to be, we do not think that the consoling character of this text will be keenly felt by impartial minds. Further, we should remember that according to Mr. Arnold, when Christ told his disciples that the Comforter should “reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment; of sin because they believed not on me, of righteousness because I go to the Father, and ye see me no more; of judgment because the prince of this world is judged,” we should understand this as importing, to those at least who agree with Mr. Arnold, only that, for some unknown reason, a new wave of feeling would follow Christ’s death, which would give mankind a new sense of their unworthiness, a new vision of Christ’s holiness, and a new confidence in the power of that “stream of tendency, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness,” in which Christ’s own personality would then be merged; and further, that this powerful stream of tendency would probably sweep away all institutions not tending to righteousness but opposing an obstacle to that tendency. Well, all we can say is that, in watering-down in this way the language of the Bible, Mr. Arnold, if he is doing nothing else, is doing what lies in his power to extinguish the distinctive significance of a great literature. The whole power of that literature depends from beginning to end on the faith in a Divine Being who holds the universe in his hand, whose will nothing can resist, who inspires the good, who punishes the evil, who judges kingdoms as he judges the hearts of men, and whose mind manifested in Christ promised to Christ’s disciples that which his power alone availed to fulfil. To substitute for a faith such as this, a belief—to our minds the wildest in the world, and the least verifiable—that “a stream of tendency” effects all that the prophets ascribed to God, or, at least so much of it as ever will be effected at all, and that Christ, by virtue merely of his complete identification with this stream of tendency, is accomplishing posthumously, without help from either Father, Son, or Spirit, all that he could have expected to accomplish through the personal agency of God, is to extract the kernel from the shell, and to ask us to accept the empty husk for the living grain. We are not reproaching Mr. Arnold for his scepticism. We are reproaching him as a literary man for trying to give currency in a debased form to language of which the whole power