We should perhaps begin with Mr. Arnold's matter, but it is hard to represent him at all without doing some preliminary justice to his manner--his attitude toward the Christian public, his dogma of urbanity, and the value of his way of putting things as a likelihood of making converts. This is the more appropriate as he thinks the Founder of Christianity, and its chief promulgators, such as Peter and Paul, gained most of their successes through manner. "Mildness and sweet reasonableness" he believes to be the characteristic of Christ's teaching--a presentment of truths long afloat in the Jewish mind so winningly and persuasively that they became new and profound convictions in all minds; and he believes that when these characteristics were withdrawn or veiled the teaching was so far ineffectual; that when Christ, addressing the Pharisees, abandoned "the mild, uncontentious, winning, inward mode of working," there was no chance at all of His gaining the persons at whom His sayings were launched; and that Saint Paul certainly had no chance of convincing those whom he calls "dogs." Now, it is inevitable for us to ask ourselves what chance Mr. Arnold, undertaking the most delicate and critical crusade that can possibly be imagined against the dearest opinions of almost everybody, will have with _his_ method. The hard hits which the Pharisees got, and which the early churches sometimes received from Paul, were direct, terrible blows, adapted to a primitive age: Mr. Arnold's hits, full of grace and sting, are adapted to our own age, and are rather worse. When he calls Pius IX. the amiable old pessimist in Saint Peter's chair, or when he calls Dr. Marsh, an Anglican divine who had hung in the railway stations some sets of biblical questions and answers which he does not approve, a "venerable and amiable Coryphaeus of our evangelical party," he uses expressions that will lash the ordinary Catholic and Churchman of his audience harder than the fisherwoman was lashed in being called an isosceles and a parallelopipedon. Not much more "sweetly reasonable" will he seem to the ordinary Cantab. when he says that the Cambridge addiction to muscularity would have sent the college, but for the Hebrew religion, "in procession, vice-chancellor, bedels, masters, scholars, and all, in spite of the professor of modern philosophy, to the temple of Aphrodite;" nor anymore "sweetly reasonable" will he seem to the ordinary innocent, conventional Churchman in asserting that the God of righteousness is displeased and disserved by men uttering such doggerel hymns as "Out of my stony griefs Bethel I'll raise," and "My Jesus to know, and feel His blood flow;" or in asserting that the modern preacher, who calls people infidels for false views of the Bible, should have the epithet returned upon him for his own false views; and that it would be just for us to say, "The bishop of So-and-so, the dean of So-and-so, and other infidel laborers