the great fault of _Literature and Dogma_ appears, not when it is considered as a piece of doubtful or not doubtful taste, but when it is regarded as a serious composition. In the first place, the child-like fashion in which Mr Arnold swallowed the results of that very remarkable "science," Biblical criticism, has always struck some readers with astonishment and a kind of terror. This new La Fontaine asking everybody, "Avez-vous lu Kuenen?" is a lesson more humbling to the pride of literature than almost any that can be found. "The prophecy of the details of Peter's death," we are told in _Literature and Dogma_, "is almost certainly an addition after the event, _because it is not at all in the manner of Jesus_." Observe that we have absolutely no details, no evidence of any sort whatever, outside the Gospels for the "manner of Jesus." It is not, as in some at least of the more risky exercises of profane criticism in a similar field, as if we had some absolutely or almost absolutely authenticated documents, and others to judge by them. External evidence, except for the mere fact of Christ's existence and death, we have none. So you must, by the inner light, pick and choose out of the very same documents, resting on the very same authority, what, according to your good pleasure, is "in the manner of Jesus," and then black-mark the rest as being not so. Of course, when Mr Arnold thus wrote, the method had not been pushed _ad absurdum_, as it was later by his friend M. Renan in the _Histoire d'Israel_, to the dismay and confusion of no less intelligent and unorthodox a critic than his other friend, M. Scherer. But it is more or less the method of all Biblical criticism of this sort, and Mr Arnold follows it blindly.