upon a swift cloud and shall come into Egypt”; this light cloud being the body of Jesus born of a virgin. Another, more fantastic, perceives in the words: “Woe unto them that draw up iniquity with cords of vanity”—a malediction of God against church bells. That assuredly is a singular method of interpreting the sacred texts, but at bottom it is no more logical to look in the sacred texts for modern ideas, good or evil, than to search them for the announcement of such and such a distant event or for a commentary on such and such a trait of contemporary manners. Really to practise the literary method—and the scientific method at the same time—one must a little forget one’s self, one’s nation, one’s century; one must live the life of past times—must become a Greek when one reads Homer, a Hebrew when one reads the Bible, and not desire that Racine should be a Shakespeare, nor Boccaccio a St. Benedict, nor Jesus a free-thinker, nor Isaiah an Epictetus or a Kant. All things and all ideas are appropriate in their own times and circumstances. Gothic cathedrals are magnificent, our small houses to-day are very comfortable; there is no reason why we should not admire the one and inhabit the other; the only thing that is really inexcusable is to be absolutely unwilling that cathedrals should be what alone they are. [Sidenote: Philosophical insufficiency of Mr. Arnold’s position.] Considered not from the point of view of history but purely from that of philosophy, Mr. Arnold’s doctrine is much more attractive, for its aim is precisely to enable us to discover our own ideas in the ancient books as in a mirror. Nothing could be better, but are we really in want of this mirror? Do we really need to rediscover our modern conceptions embodied in the form of myth and more or less distorted in the process? Do we really need voluntarily to go back to the state of mind of primitive peoples? Do we really need to dwell upon the somewhat narrow conception that they possessed of justice and of morality before we shall be capable of conceiving a justice more generous in its proportions and a morality more worthy of its name? Would it not be much the same sort of thing as for one who was teaching children physics to begin by seriously inculcating the classic theory of nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum, of immobility of the earth, etc.? The authors of the Talmud in their naïve faith said that Javeh, filled with veneration for the book which he had himself dictated, would devote the first three hours of every day to a study of the sacred law. The most orthodox Jews do not to-day oblige their God to this recurrent period of meditation; might not one without danger permit mankind a somewhat similar economy of time? Mr. Arnold, whose mind moves so easily, although with so plentiful a lack of directness and of logic, criticises somewhere or other those who feel a need of a foundation of fable for their faith, a foundation of supernatural intervention