ship, and love determine our relations to each other as churches, and as churches our relations to the great outside world. We cannot do our work without larger aims. Life is keyless to the selfish. Independency is but one remove from isolation, coldness, weakness. We cannot stand with our scented robes about us and refuse to touch and be touched, or to lock arms and join hands with those akin to us, that we may more widely scatter our benedictions. Every denomination - ours surely as much as anyought to be a drilled body of crusaders, a brotherhood for mutual help, and for largest service to the human race. I have spoken, after all, of what is but a tendency. Started by no clique or party,

it cannot be ridiculed or sneered at. Like all great historic movements, occasioned by the necessities or aspirations of the age, it deserves respectful attention and tolerant treatment. The reaching out for a richer and more varied worship; the growing popularity of responsive reading from the Psalter, of the use of "the Gloria Patri," and historic hymns in favor with the early church, cannot be charged up to "discontent," or be dismissed as "the fad of the hour" in certain church circles. The impersonal thought of any age, which becomes widespread and dominant, is greater than the conceits and theories of those who resist all change and try to hold things as they are. A tendency such as we describe is as a gulf-stream through the else currentless ocean of thought. I have profound respect for new intellectual and spiritual movements; they oftentimes are the forerunners of a broader, better life. As no one person can be held accountable for their genesis, so no one person can hope successfully to oppose them. It is surely not revolutionary to approve of what our circumstances and the nature of our Christian work seem to have necessitated. In the new States there is manifestly a call for something besides the old New England independency. Even sanctified individualism is not as promotive of genuine and general growth as consecrated coöperation, the union of all forces in mutual fellowship and toil. It is not ecclesiasticism that is the resultant of the tendency we describe and welcome; it is completer organization, in a day and field where the best organized bodies are the most effective for all sorts of gospel effort. We are lacking in fealty to our own standards, and not responsive to our own sacred obligations, when churches of our order stand aloof in selfish isolation, and do nothing for those societies which we have formed and commissioned to do the religious work falling upon us as Congregational Christians. Something is lacking when individualism thus

runs to seed, and disowns all the opportunities and obligations which spring out of coöperative service. We are now no longer excluded from the South, and as a denomination are as national and widespread geographically as any other; and where so much depends upon sympathy, systematic beneficence, and practical fellowship, we must acknowledge and promote closer organic relations. Our mission is one not of polemics but irenics, and we never before had such promising possibilities as at the present time. While we are Congregational churches, there is a sense, as there is a call, in which we may be said to be the Congregational Church. We compromise in no respect our freedom and independence as separate households of faith by yielding to this tendency. Our great policy is self-instruction; our weapons are ideas. We are called to a vast evangelism, and our national societies must therefore become more distinctively the representatives and servants of the churches. We can now appear in every field where service for God and man is possible, with generous and explicit selfassertion. Nor need we blush, whether we go West or South, to say with emphasis, as we meet Christians of other names and from other communions with fresh pride in their strength and achievements, "We are Congregationalists." Man in his sharply defined and selfish individualism is being superseded by man in coöperative communion and brotherhoods of help. The air rings with the proof that social problems are supreme. Questions of social economics take first rank, not in the market only, but in the school and the sanctuary. We are engaged in quarrying new stones, reshaping old ones, to bring to completer finish and larger influence our Congregational heritage. In union there is strength; in a centralized yet free church-life are the potencies we need to grasp.

The basis of our spiritual order is laid in the sacrifice of Christ. Our greatest comfort, as workers together in the vanguard of our Lord, comes from the sense that we are not alone, but belong to one another. We are one in purpose; we are not guerrillas, fighting where and as we choose. Rather let us remember that we are a body of believers, moving with one spirit, knowing our part and loyally performing it. Whether we are weak or strong, large or small, we make the one marching, militant Pilgrim church; the same that our fathers instituted and yet different, conjuring by the same great name, yet owning the charm of an ever closer fellowship, and the spell of an ever deeper blending life.

LOWELL, MASS.

VOL. XII.

NO. 69.

18

Malcolm McG. Dana.

MATTHEW ARNOLD'S INFLUENCE ON LITERATURE.

MATTHEW ARNOLD's influence in the field of literature has proved one of much more comprehensive scope than it has been the fashion of the general mind to admit. I think it is true that common judgment has attributed to him a very partial range of study, and a very defined outlook, or, at least, that he possessed a mind whose ideas have radiated from certain fixed tenets of artistic and literary belief, and, having so radiated, have succeeded in enlightening only a certain range of intellectual area. But this conception of Mr. Arnold would do him injustice. Perhaps, on the contrary, the criticism would be entertained by his more professional readers, that if he had concentrated his finely trained mind on a less number of subjects, he might have produced a more efficacious and lasting body of commentary, and have avoided fields wherein he was not altogether master.

It is a very common fault with gifted minds, that a studious ambition tempts to the review of a multitude of questions, and Mr. Arnold did not lack this stimulus; his equipment and schooling, for the foundations of which he was especially indebted to a thorough master (his own father), and his subsequent university life as scholar and teacher, led him, naturally, to make various excursions in these fields of research, and aroused his fertile mind to persistent work. His earlier career as a student was fortunate in opening to him an intimate personal association with Wordsworth, for whom he acquired a feeling of reverent love, which he retained to the last, and with whom he was admitted to an intellectual and personal sympathy which determined, perhaps, more than any other one event the tendency of his subsequent aspirations. He became imbued with the Wordsworthian temper, the calm elevation of his thought, the high and pure atmosphere of his genius, and the austere simplicity of his poetic diction, feeling, and inspiration. How beneficent such personal contact, of a young, absorbing soul, with one so exceptional and unique as the great poet, is well attested in the clear aim and ideals of Mr. Arnold; it plainly exercised marked influence in forming the standards of Mr. Arnold's ideals, more ample than any other associations of that time, if not of any time in his career.

As I have intimated, Mr. Arnold's work is manifold: he first, at the age of twenty-one years, won the Newdigate prize for English verse at Oxford; at twenty-five, after graduating, he was

elected Fellow of Oriel College, just thirty years after his father's election to the same fellowship in the same college; thus far he had followed closely the relationship and the course of his father, then so famous in the field of English scholarship and tuition.

With a mind so sturdy and diligent, so receptive in scholarly attainment, with the conspicuous life of his father's fame, and the pure radiance of Wordsworth's poetic lustre leading him, it is not singular that he felt their spirit and power, and bent himself persistently to achieve something that should make him worthy to bear the name of so eminent a sire, and to merit the friendship of the great laureate. Mr. Arnold's early resolution to enter the literary field was never then or after-challenged by any competing inclination. It is much to the good-fortune of a young man when congeniality and circumstances can meet, unhindered, in his selection of a career; and doubly advantageous when, in such selection, he is endowed with especially fitting gifts to meet the demands awaiting him. The prestige of his father was not without its service in rendering these endowments available, but the fact that these conditions were supplemented by an enthusiasm and an industry quite equal to his surroundings was, after all, the commanding one.

His poetic and critical careers, after a few years, went hand in hand. He early advanced a theory, and a curriculum of study, peculiarly stimulating to his mind, a course which harmonized with his nature, and did much to formulate his ideals, namely, that Greek art and poetry should model our own. With him the

Greek spirit, art, motive, and expression, in every form, so clear and definite, and so perfect in culture, were our hope in the development of our own. The world of art and letters, he believed, had no higher standards; the Western mind, during many centuries, had hardly succeeded in evolving anything in the realms of art and intellectual culture to compare, in beauty and elevation, with that of the Greek genius; this had, thus far, proved its supremacy. He said, "that the Greeks, at any rate, knew what they wanted in Art, and we do not."

The trend of Mr. Arnold's mind conformed to the conditions of the ancient Greek standards; their general effects, their subjection of parts to the perfection of the whole, their ideals chaste, stately, unimpassioned, and wrought with marvelous finish captivated his orderly mind and imagination, which were alien to the conditions of a vast, transitional civilization.

Mr. Arnold's mind and methods were always under the domin

ion of an ideal purpose, aiming to accomplish a definite result, than of the irregular, unshaped workings of an overmastering and immeasurable impulse. The Greek spirit thus entering his earlier life as a guide became a continuous and enduring resource with him, not in classic form, illustration, or diction, such as entered so effectively into Milton's great epics as to give to his Christian ideals a pagan setting, but as an infusion, an essence, imparting its calm spirit and motive, and keeping him imperturbed against the temptations that met and urged him to join the bewildering and uncertain excursions in modern art and feeling. Most young, intellectual, and scholarly aspirants start out with these same Greek restraints, but the pressure and passion for popular favor, the flood of romantic feeling, and the restive, impulsive modern thought, tend soon to overmaster their maiden resolutions, and to evaporate any distinctive classic enthusiasm. And, as I have said, the fact which accounts for Mr. Arnold's sturdy adherence to his first devotion exists in the native trend of his taste and imagination, which, from first to last, bore the stamp of its classic seal. Yet while Mr. Arnold was consistent with the spirit of his mind and training, in this direction, he saw the unwisdom of subservience to a purely classic manner. Latin verses and Greek odes are not in demand, and are not considered as essential to happiness in our time; and while he was peculiarly and actively endowed on the side of Hellenic ideals, he thought of these only as they would serve him in ennobling and elevating the standards of the more advanced and complex presentation of modern ideas. Yet the Ancients were no affectation with him; every faculty of his mind responded to them; he delighted in reviewing their harmonious beauty from every point, was partial to every suggestion which they could make; his choice vocabulary, the subordination of imagery, the absence of redundance and ornateness, the severity of manner, the restraint of feeling, the large and easy dignity of his style, were in unison with, and approved by, his classic tuition, and appeared to him the correct and preeminently admissible standards. If this responsive loyalty to classic training had its advantage, it also had its disadvantage; for however subjective he might assume to make it, it held a certain repressive dominion over such sympathy and feeling as he was capable of expressing, and led him to accentuate the cold, crystallized, and more markedly intellectual side, and to slight the profounder tones of sentiment and religion, which the Western mind entertains, in its relation to the presentations of life and thought, and