Abstract

In the midst of the religious upheaval of Victorian England, from 1860 to 1880, Matthew Arnold proposed a broad middle way between the shocking new secularism and the easily shocked clerical conservatism, which were warring over the philosophy of Evolution, Christian dogma and Biblical criticism. Full of moral seriousness in conduct, which for him composed ‘three–quarters’ of human life, and anxious to preserve religion as the natural fulfilment of deep human need, he simply proposed that its supreme written source, the Christian Bible be regarded, neither as the expression of literal fact nor of unscientific theory, but as moving literature to be interpreted by the mature insight of wide humanist culture. The late works in which he proposed this religious novelty in contrast with his purely literary efforts have been depreciated commonly and their message misinterpreted, as the epigram of F. Meyers shrewdly observes: “He has been treated as a flippant and illusory Christian, instead of as a specially devout and conservative agnostic”.