A purely moral symbolism may be regarded from either of two points of view: the concrete, which is that of history; or the abstract, which is that of philosophy. Historically nothing could be more inexact than Mr. Arnold’s method, which essentially consists in making a present of the most refined conceptions of our epoch to primitive peoples. It gives us to understand, for example, that the Javeh of the Hebrews was not regarded as a perfectly definite person, a transcendent power altogether distinct and separate from the world and manifesting himself by acts of capricious volition, a king of the skies, a lord of battles, bestowing on his people victory or defeat, abundance or famine, sickness or health. It suffices to read one page of the Bible or the New Testament to convince one’s self that a doubt as to the personal existence of Javeh never for an instant crossed the Hebrew mind. So be it, Mr. Arnold will say, but Javeh was in their eyes no more, after all, than the personification of justice, because they believed powerfully in justice. It would be more exact to say that the Hebrews had not as yet a very philosophic notion of justice; that they conceived it as an order received from without, a command which it would be dangerous to disobey, a hostile will forcibly imposed upon one’s own. Nothing could be more natural in the sequel than to personify such a will. But is that precisely what we understand nowadays by justice; and does it not really seem to Mr. Arnold himself that he is playing on words, when he endeavours to make us believe all that? Fear of the Lord is not justice. There are matters that one cannot express in the form of legend when one has once really conceived them—matters the true poetry of which consists in their very purity, in their simplicity. To personify justice, to represent it as external to ourselves under the form of a menacing power, is not to possess a “high idea” of it; is not in the least, as Mr. Arnold phrases it, to be aglow with it, illuminated by it; it is, on the contrary, not yet really to have formed a conception of justice. What Mr. Arnold regards as the sublimest expression of an altogether modern moral sentiment is, on the contrary, a partial negation of it. Mr. Arnold’s aim, as he says, is a “literary” criticism; but the literary method consists in resetting the great works of human genius in the circumstances among which they were conceived; in discovering in them the spirit of the age in which they were written, and not of the present age. If we endeavour to interpret history by the light of modern ideas we shall never understand a jot of it. Mr. Arnold is pleasantly satirical at the expense of those who find in the Bible allusions to contemporary events, to such and such a modern custom, to such and such a dogma unknown to primitive times. A commentator, he says, finds a prediction of the flight to Egypt in the prophecy of Isaiah: “The Lord rideth