And then you calmly say
again, 'It is all a mistake. Only believe in a something --and we will
make it as easy for you as possible. Hell shall have no more than a fine
equable temperature, really good for the constitution; there shall be
nobody in it except Judas Iscariot and one or two others; and even the
poor Devil shall have a chance if he will resolve to mend his ways.' "
Mr. Matthew Arnold may, I suppose, be numbered among the agnostics, but
he was
[219] of a very different type. He introduced a new kind of criticism of
the Bible--literary criticism. Deeply concerned for morality and
religion, a supporter of the Established Church, he took the Bible under
his special protection, and in three works, St. Paul and Protestantism,
1870, Literature and Dogma, 1873, and God and the Bible, 1875, he
endeavoured to rescue that book from its orthodox exponents, whom he
regarded as the corrupters of Christianity. It would be just, he says,
"but hardly perhaps Christian," to fling back the word infidel at the
orthodox theologians for their bad literary and scientific criticisms of
the Bible and to speak of "the torrent of infidelity which pours every
Sunday from our pulpits!" The corruption of Christianity has been due to
theology "with its insane licence of affirmation about God, its insane
licence of affirmation about immortality"; to the hypothesis of "a
magnified and non-natural man at the head of mankind's and the world's
affairs"; and the fancy account of God "made up by putting scattered
expressions of the Bible together and taking them literally.
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