Page:Culture and Anarchy, Third edition, 1882, Matthew Arnold.djvu/274

218 to be led to the very same conclusions, though from a point of view of its own, as our free-trading Liberal friends. Hebraism, with that mechanical and misleading use of the letter of Scripture on which we have already commented, is governed by such texts as: Be fruitful and multiply, the edict of God's law, as Mr. Chambers would say; or by the declaration of what he would call God's word in the Psalms, that the man who has a great number of children is thereby made happy. And in conjunction with such texts as these, Hebraism is apt to place another text: The poor shall never cease out of the land. Thus Hebraism is conducted to nearly the same notion as the popular mind and as Mr. Robert Buchanan, that children are sent, and that the divine nature takes a delight in swarming the East End of London with paupers. Only, when they are perishing in their helplessness and wretchedness, it asserts the Christian duty of succouring them, instead of saying, like the Times: 'Now their brief spring is over; there is nobody to blame for this; it is the result of Nature's simplest laws!' But, like the Times, Hebraism despairs of any help from knowledge and says that 'what is wanted is not the light of speculation.'

I remember, only the other day, a good man looking with me upon a multitude of children who were gathered