Well, but, it may be urged, Elsmere is after all only a fictitious character, taken from a novel purporting, as Bishop Creighton said, to describe a man who once was a Christian and ceased to be one, but really describing a man who never was a Christian, and eventually found it out. This, of course, is true, but it must be presumed that the Reverend Robert is not absolutely the creature of a vivid imagination, but stands for some real men and women who, in actual life, came under the author's observation. If that be so, we must admit that Arnold's dogma about Miracles had a practical effect upon certain minds. An Elsmere of a different type--a flippant Elsmere, if such a portent could be conceived--might have answered that, if miracles happened, they would not be miracles; in other words, that events of frequent occurrence are not called miracles; and that it belongs to the idea of a miracle that it is a special and signal suspension of the Divine Law, for a great purpose and a great occasion. If, again, Robert, eschewing flippancy, had retired on abstract theory, he might have said that an event so unique and so transcendent as the assumption of human nature by Eternal God seems to demand, in the fitness of things, a method of entry into the material world, and a method of departure from it, wholly and strikingly dissimilar to the established order--in common parlance, miraculous. Answers conceived in these two senses--some rough and popular and declamatory, some learned and argumentative and scientific--appeared in great numbers. "Grave objections are alleged against the book.... Its conclusions about the meaning of the term _God_, and about man's knowledge of God, are severely condemned; strong objections are taken to our view of the Bible-documents in general, to our account of the Canon of the Gospels, to our estimate of the Fourth Gospel." To these criticisms Arnold might have added one yet more cogent. It was felt by many of his readers, and even by some of his most attached disciples, that the "sinuous, easy, unpolemical method" which he vaunted, and which he applied so happily to criticism of books and life, was not grave enough, or cogent enough, when applied to the criticism of Religion. From first to last his method was arbitrary. [Greek: Hantos hepha]--the Master said it. This was excellent when he criticised literature. To say that a verse of Macaulay's was painful, or a line of Francis Newman's hideous, was well within his province. To say that one author wrote in the Grand Style and that another showed the Note of Provinciality--that also was his right. To pronounce that a passage from Sophocles was religious poetry of the highest and most edifying type,[51] whereas the Eternal Power was displeased by "such doggerel hymns as _Sing Glory, Glory, Glory, to the Great God Triune,_"