Page:Culture and Anarchy, Third edition, 1882, Matthew Arnold.djvu/159

Rh those with whom I was conversing. 'Oh,' said one who was their spokesman, with the most tranquil air of conviction, 'it is true the Saturday Review abuses the lecture, but the British Banner' (I am not quite sure it was the British Banner, but it was some newspaper of that stamp)' says that the Saturday Review is quite wrong.' The speaker had evidently no notion that there was a scale of value for judgments on these topics, and that the judgments of the Saturday Review ranked high on this scale, and those of the British Banner low; the taste of the bathos implanted by nature in the literary judgments of man had never, in my friend's case, encountered any let or hindrance.

Just the same in religion as in literature. We have most of us little idea of a high standard to choose our guides by, of a great and profound spirit which is an authority while inferior spirits are none. It is enough to give importance to things that this or that person says them decisively, and has a large following of some strong kind when he says them. This habit of ours is very well shown in that able and interesting work of Mr. Hepworth Dixon's, which we were all reading lately, The Mormons, by One of Themselves. Here, again, I am not quite sure that my memory serves me as to the exact title, but I mean the well-known book in which Mr. Hepworth