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ST. PAUL & PROTESTANTISM


    "We often read the Scripture without comprehending its full
    meaning; however, let us not be discouraged. The light, in God's
    good time, will break out, and disperse the darkness; and we
    shall see the mysteries of the Gospel."

                                                BISHOP WILSON.


    "With them (the Puritans) nothing is more familiar than to plead
    in their causes _the Law of God, the Word of the Lord_; who
    notwithstanding, when they come to allege what word and what law
    they mean, their common ordinary practice is to quote
    by-speeches, and to urge them as if they were written in most
    exact form of law. What is to add to the Law of God if this be
    not?"

                                                HOOKER.


    "It will be found at last, that unity, and the peace of the
    Church, will conduce more to the saving of souls, than the most
    specious sects, varnished with the most pious, specious
    pretences."

                                                BISHOP WILSON.


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 ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM


 _WITH AN ESSAY ON PURITANISM AND
 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND_

 BY

 MATTHEW ARNOLD

 FORMERLY PROFESSOR OF POETRY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
 AND FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE

 _THIRD EDITION_

 LONDON

 SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE

 1875

 (_The right of translation is reserved_)


               *       *       *       *       *

PREFACE.

(1870.)


The essay following the treatise on St. Paul and Protestantism, was
meant to clear away offence or misunderstanding which had arisen out of
that treatise. There still remain one or two points on which a word of
explanation may be useful, and to them this preface is addressed.

The general objection, that the scheme of doctrine criticised by me is
common to both Puritanism and the Church of England, and does not
characterise the one more essentially than the other, has been removed,
I hope, by the concluding essay. But it is said that there is, at
any rate, a large party in the Church of England,--the so-called
_Evangelical_ party,--which holds just the scheme of doctrine I have
called Puritan; that this large party, at least, if not the whole Church
of England, is as much a stronghold of the distinctive Puritan tenets as
the Nonconformists are; and that to tax the Nonconformists with these
tenets, and to say nothing about the Evangelical clergy holding them
too, is injurious and unfair.

The Evangelical party in the Church of England we must always,
certainly, have a disposition to treat with forbearance, inasmuch as
this party has so strongly loved what is indeed the most loveable of
things,--religion. They have also avoided that unblessed mixture of
politics and religion by which both politics and religion are spoilt.
This, however, would not alone have prevented our making them jointly
answerable with the Puritans for that body of opinions which calls
itself Scriptural Protestantism, but which is, in truth, a perversion of
St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans. But there is this difference between
the Evangelical party in the Church of England and the Puritans outside
her;--the Evangelicals have not added to the first error of holding this
unsound body of opinions, the second error of separating for them. They
have thus, as we have already noticed, escaped the mixing of politics
and religion, which arises directly and naturally out of this separating
for opinions. But they have also done that which we most blame
Nonconformity for not doing;--they have left themselves in the way of
development. Practically they have admitted that the Christian Church is
built, not on the foundation of Lutheran and Calvinist dogmas, but on
the foundation: _Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart
from iniquity._[1] Mr. Ryle or the Dean of Ripon may have as erroneous
notions as to what _truth_ and _the gospel_ really is, as Mr. Spurgeon
or the President of the Wesleyan Conference; but they do not tie
themselves tighter still to these erroneous notions, nor do their best
to cut themselves off from outgrowing them, by resolving _to have no
fellowship with the man of sin_ who holds different notions. On the
contrary, they are worshippers in the same Church, professors of the
same faith, ministers of the same confraternity, as men who hold that
their _Scriptural Protestantism_ is all wrong, and who hold other
notions of their own quite at variance with it. And thus they do homage
to an ideal of Christianity which is larger, higher, and better than
either their notions or those of their opponents, and in respect of
which both their notions and those of their opponents are inadequate;
and this admission of the relative inadequacy of their notions is itself
a stage towards the future admission of their positive inadequacy.

[Footnote 1: II _Timothy_, ii, 19.]

In fact, the popular Protestant theology, which we have criticised as
such a grave perversion of the teaching of St. Paul, has not in the
so-called Evangelical party of the Church of England its chief centre
and stronghold. This party, which, following in the wake of Wesley and
others, so felt in a day of general insensibility the power and comfort
of the Christian religion, and which did so much to make others feel
them, but which also adopted and promulgated a scientific account so
inadequate and so misleading of the religion which attracted it,--this
great party has done its work, and is now undergoing that law of
transformation and development which obtains in a national Church. The
power is passing from it to others, who will make good some of the
aspects of religion which the Evangelicals neglected, and who will then,
in their turn, from the same cause of the scientific inadequacy of their
conception of Christianity, change and pass away. The Evangelical clergy
no longer recruits itself with success, no longer lays hold on such
promising subjects as formerly. It is losing the future and feels that
it is losing it. Its signs of a vigorous life, its gaiety and audacity,
are confined to its older members, too powerful to lose their own
vigour, but without successors to whom to transmit it. It was impossible
not to admire the genuine and rich though somewhat brutal humour of the
Dean of Ripon's famous similitude of the two lepers.[2] But from which
of the younger members of the Evangelical clergy do such strokes now
come