symbolic nature of all language concerning the "eternities," and
confounds a different mode of expression with a difference of the facts
and realities expressed.

Matthew Arnold, too, believed in the Catholicism of the future; but in
how different a sense! What he hoped for was, roughly speaking, the
preservation of the ancient and beautiful husk after the kernel had been
withered up and discarded; what Patmore looked forward to was the
expansion of the kernel bursting one involucre after another, and ever
clamouring for fairer and more adequate covering. With one, the language
of religion was all too wide; with the other, all too narrow, for its
real signification. Arnold belongs to the first, Patmore to the last of
those three stages of religious thought of which Mr. Champneys writes:

The first is represented by those whose creed is so simple as to afford
little or no ground for contention; the second by such as in their
search for greater precision enlarge the domain of dogma, but fail to
pass beyond its mere technical aspect; the third consists of those who
rise from the technical to the spiritual, and without repudiating or
disparaging dogma, use it mainly as a guide and support to thought which
transcends mere definition.


_Dec._ 1900.



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