Now this is all very pretty and very creditable, but it will not work. The goods, to use the vulgar but precise formula of English law, "are not of the nature and quality demanded by the purchaser." Nobody wants a religion of that sort. Conduct is good; poetic appreciation is perhaps better, though not for the general. But then religion happens to be something different from either, though no doubt closely connected with both. Mr Arnold does not exactly offer us a stone for bread, but he does, like the benevolent French princess in the story, offer us pie-crust. Pie-crust is a good thing; it is a close connection of bread; but it will not do for a substitute, and, in addition, it is much more difficult for the general to obtain. Moreover, there is a serious, a historical, difficulty about Conduct _plus_ poetic appreciation, but _minus_ what we call religion. Mr Arnold, in a stately sonnet, has told us that Sophocles was his ideal as a life-philosopher who was also a poet. He knew, presumably, the stories told about Sophocles in Athenaeus, and though these might be idle scandal, he knew far too much not to be aware that there is nothing intrinsically impossible about them. It would have been rather interesting to hear him fully on this subject. But he was too busy with expatiating on the sweet reasonableness of Jesus and "the _Aberglaube_ of the Second Advent" to trouble himself with awkward matters of this kind at the moment. It may be suspected, however, that he did trouble himself with them, or with something like them, afterwards. The book--a deliberate provocation--naturally found plenty of respondents, though I do not remember that any one smashed it, as, for instance, Dean Mansel could have done if he had been alive, or as Cardinal Newman could, had he been still in the fold. Mr Arnold was perhaps not less really disquieted by its comparative popularity. For he had quite enough of Phocion in him to feel, if not to say, that he must have said something at least ambiguous, when the multitude applauded. At any rate, though the ill-omened series did not cease, nothing further appeared in it which showed the tone of _Literature and Dogma_. Indeed, of the concluding volumes, _God and the Bible_ and _Last Essays on Church and Religion_, the first is an elaborate and rather anxious apology, and the second a collection of diverse and comparatively "anodyne" essays. It is significant--as showing how much of the success of _Literature and Dogma_ had been a success of scandal--that neither of these volumes enjoyed the least popularity. _God and the Bible_ was never reprinted till the popular edition of the series thus far in 1884; and _Last Essays_ was never reprinted at all, or had not been up to the date of the invaluable _Bibliography_ of the works. Indeed the copies now, 1899, on sale appear to be of the first edition. This cool reception does not discredit either Barbarians or Philistines or Populace. There are good