considered as a piece of doubtful or not doubtful taste, but when it
is regarded as a serious composition.

In the first place, the child-like fashion in which Mr Arnold
swallowed the results of that very remarkable "science," Biblical
criticism, has always struck some readers with astonishment and a kind
of terror. This new La Fontaine asking everybody, "Avez-vous lu
Kuenen?" is a lesson more humbling to the pride of literature than
almost any that can be found. "The prophecy of the details of Peter's
death," we are told in _Literature and Dogma_, "is almost
certainly an addition after the event, _because it is not at all in
the manner of Jesus_." Observe that we have absolutely no details,
no evidence of any sort whatever, outside the Gospels for the "manner
of Jesus." It is not, as in some at least of the more risky exercises
of profane criticism in a similar field, as if we had some absolutely
or almost absolutely authenticated documents, and others to judge by
them. External evidence, except for the mere fact of Christ's
existence and death, we have none. So you must, by the inner light,
pick and choose out of the very same documents, resting on the very
same authority, what, according to your good pleasure, is "in the
manner of Jesus," and then black-mark the rest as being not so. Of
course, when Mr Arnold thus wrote, the method had not been pushed
_ad absurdum_, as it was later by his friend M. Renan in the
_Histoire d'Israël_, to the dismay and confusion of no less
intelligent and unorthodox a critic than his other friend, M. Scherer.
But it is more or less the method of all Biblical criticism of this
sort, and Mr Arnold follows it blindly.

Again, the chief bent of the book is to establish that "miracles do
not happen." Alas! it is Mr Arnold's unhappy lot that if miracles