Page:Matthew Arnold (IA matthewarnold00harr).pdf/30

 It so happens that this, the summing up of the mission of Culture, is entirely and exactly the mission of Positivism, and is even expressed in the very language used by Comte in all his writings, and notably in his Appeal to Conservatives (1855). How pleasantly we can fancy Culture now meeting the Founder of Positivism in some Elysian Fields, and accosting him in that inimitably genial way: 'Ah, well! I see now that we were not so far apart, but I never had patience to read your rather dry French, you know!'

Of his Theology, or his Anti-Theology, even less need be said here. It was most interesting and pregnant, and was certainly the source of his great popularity and vogue. Here indeed he touched to the quick the Hebraism of our middle classes, the thought of our cultured classes, the insurgent instincts of the People. It was a singular mixture—Anglican divinity adjusted to the Pantheism of Spinoza—to parody a famous definition of Huxley's, it was Anglicanism minus Christianity, and even Theism. It is difficult for the poor Philistine to grasp the notion that all this devotional sympathy with the Psalmists, Prophets, and Evangelists, this beautiful enthusiasm for 'the secret of Jesus' and the 'profound originality' of Paul, was possible to a man whose intellect rejected the belief that there was even any probable evidence for the personality of God, or for the celestial immortality of the soul, who flatly denied the existence of miracle, and treated the entire fabric of dogmatic theology as a figment. Yet this is the truth: and what is more, this startling, and somewhat parodoxical, transformation scene of the Anglican creeds and formularies sank deep into the reflective minds of many thinking men and women, who could neither abandon the spiritual poetry of the Bible nor resist the demonstrations of science. The combination, amongst many combinations, is one that, in a different form, was taught by