belief, have come nowadays, no doubt, in the face of modern faith, to be in need of justification; and this justification they will obtain; to be understood is itself to be forgiven. [57] See M. L. Ménard, _ibid._ (_Crit. relig., 1879._) [Sidenote: The moral doctrine of the New Testament the main strength of Christianity.] If the New Testament contains at all a more or less reflective moral theory, it is assuredly that of love. Charity, or rather affectionate justice (charity is always justice, absolutely considered), such is the “secret” of Jesus. The New Testament may then be considered, according to the opinion of Mr. Matthew Arnold, as before all else a treatise on symbolical morality. The actual superiority of the New Testament, as compared with Paganism and with pagan philosophy, is a moral superiority; therein lay the secret of its success. There is no theology in the New Testament unless it be the Jewish theology, and the Jewish theology had proved itself incapable of the conquest of the world. The power of the New Testament lay in its morality, and it is its morality which even in our times survives still, more or less transformed by modern progress. And it is upon the morality of the New Testament that modern Christian societies must of necessity lean, it is in the morality of the New Testament that they will find their true strength; the morality of the New Testament is the principal argument that they can invoke in proof of the legitimacy of religion itself and, so to speak, of God. [Sidenote: Logical outcome of Matthew Arnold’s position.] Mr. Matthew Arnold and the group of liberal critics, who, like him, are inspired by the spirit of the age (_Zeitgeist_), seem thus to have guided faith to the ultimate point beyond which nothing remains but to break definitively with the past and its texts and dogmas.