now at length discovered to be fictitious"; and habitually talking as if
"this were an agreed point among all people of discernment." Great was
the vexation of the "old Liberal hacks" who had been repeating these
dismal shibboleths, and ignoring or denying the greatest force in human
life, to find in this new teacher of liberal ideas a convinced and
persistent opponent. He affirmed that Religion was the best, the
sweetest, and the strongest thing in the world; he insisted that without
it there could be no perfect culture, no complete civilization; he
showed a reverent admiration for the historical character and teaching
of Jesus Christ; he urged the example of His "mildness and sweet
reasonableness." He taught that the best way of extending Christ's
kingdom on earth was by sweetening the character and brightening the
lives of the men and women whose nature He shared.

It belongs to another part of this work to enquire what he meant by
Religion and Christianity, and how far his interpretations accorded
with, or how far they departed from, the traditional creed of
Christendom. But enough, perhaps, has been said to explain why the
appearance of _Culture and Anarchy_ so profoundly disquieted the "old
Liberal hacks" and the popular teachers of irreligion. One of these
called Christianity "that awful plague which has destroyed two
civilizations and but barely failed to slay such promise of good as is
now struggling to live amongst men." Of that teacher, and of others like
him, Arnold wrote in later years: "If the matter were not so serious one
could hardly help smiling at the chagrin and manifest perplexity of such
of one's friends as happen to be philosophical radicals and secularists,
at having to reckon with religion again when they thought its day was
quite gone by, and that they need not study it any more or take account
of it any more; that it was passing out, and a kind of new gospel, half
Bentham, half Cobden, in which they were themselves particularly strong,