This reliance of Puritanism on Holy Scripture, or certain portions of it, seems to have set him on the endeavour to ascertain how far the Puritans had really mastered the meaning of the writers on whom they relied; and more particularly of St. Paul. And this particular direction seems to have been given to his thoughts by a sentence, then recently published, of Renan: "After having been for three hundred years, thanks to Protestantism, the Christian doctor _par excellence_, Paul is now coming to an end of his reign." Arnold, as his manner was, fastened on these last words, and made them the text of his treatise on _St. Paul and Protestantism_, which began to appear in October, 1869. "_St. Paul is now coming to an end of his reign._ Precisely the contrary, I venture to think, is the judgment to which a true criticism of men and of things leads us. The Protestantism which has so used and abused St. Paul is coming to an end;... but the real reign of St. Paul is only beginning." In _Culture and Anarchy_ he had shown how "the over-Hebraizing of Puritanism, and its want of a wide culture, so narrow its range and impair its vision that even the documents which it thinks all-sufficient, and to the study of which it exclusively rivets itself, it does not rightly understand, but is apt to make of them something quite different from what they really are. In short, no man, who knows nothing else, knows even his Bible." And he showed how readers of the Bible attached to essential words and ideas of the Bible a sense which was not the writer's. Now, he said, let us go further on the same path, and, "instead of lightly disparaging the great name of St. Paul, let us see if the needful thing is not rather to rescue St. Paul and the Bible from the perversion of them by mistaken men." Although he calls the treatise in which he addresses himself to this endeavour _St. Paul and Protestantism_, therein following Renan's phraseology, in the treatise itself he speaks rather of St. Paul and _Puritanism_; and this he does because here in England Puritanism is the strong and special representation of Protestantism. "The Church of England," he says, "existed before Protestantism and contains much besides Protestantism." Remove the Protestant schemes of doctrine, which here and there show themselves in her documents, "and all which is most valuable in the Church of England would still remain"; whereas those schemes are the very life and substance of Puritanism and the Puritan bodies. "It is the positive Protestantism of Puritanism with which we are here concerned, as distinguished from the negative Protestantism of the Church of England." Leaving, then, the Church of England on one side, we fix our gaze on Puritanism, and we see that "the conception of the ways of God to man which Puritanism has formed for itself" has for its cardinal points the terms _Election_ and _Justification_. "Puritanism's very reason for existing depends on the worth of this its vital