depends on its being used honestly in the original sense. “The Eternal” means one thing when it means the everlasting and supreme thought and will and life; it is an expression utterly blank and dead when it means nothing but a select “stream of tendency” which is assumed, for no particular reason, to be constant, permanent, and victorious. “Living water” means one thing when it means the living stream of God’s influence; it has no salvation in it at all when it means only that which is the purest of the many tendencies in human life. The shadow of judgment means one thing when it is cast by the will of the supreme righteousness; it has no solemnity in it when it expresses only the sanguine anticipation of human virtue. There is no reason on earth why Mr. Arnold should not water-down the teaching of the Bible to his own view of its residual meaning; but then, in the name of sincere literature, let him find his own language for it, and not dress up this feeble and superficial hopefulness of the nineteenth century in words which are undoubtedly stamped with an ardor and a peace for which his teaching can give us no sort of justification. “Solidity and verification,” indeed! Never was there a doctrine with less bottom in it and less pretence of verification than his; but be that as it may, he must know, as well as we know, that his doctrine is as different from the doctrine of the Bible as the shadow is different from the substance. Has Mr. Arnold lately read Dr. Newman’s great Oxford sermon on “Unreal Words”? If not, we wish he would refer to it again, and remember the warning addressed to those who “use great words and imitate the sentences of others,” and who “fancy that those whom they imitate had as little meaning as themselves,” or “perhaps contrive to think that they themselves have a meaning adequate to their words.” It is to us impossible to believe that Mr. Arnold should have indulged such an illusion. He knows too well the difference between the great faith which spoke in prophet and apostle, and the feeble faith which absorbs a drop or two of grateful moisture from a “stream of tendency” on the banks of which it weakly lingers. Mr. Arnold is really putting Literature,—of which he is so great a master,—to shame, when he travesties the language of the prophets, and the evangelists, and of our Lord himself, by using it to express the dwarfed convictions and withered hopes of modern rationalists who love to repeat the great words of the Bible, after they have given up the strong meaning of them as fanatical superstitions. Mr. Arnold’s readings of Scriptures are the spiritual _assignats_ of English faith.—_Spectator._ AUTHORS AS SUPPRESSORS OF THEIR BOOKS. BY W. H. OLDING, LL.B.