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166

MATTHEW ARNOLD'S NEW POEMS.

is the form in which the enemy has appeared to him; such in his eyes has been the banner, such the watchword under which they serve. All Philistia for him is resumed in the English Philistine; who may probably be the most noisome example in the world, bat is assuredly not the only one. I do not say that marriage dissoluble only in an English divorce court is a lovely thing or a venerable; I do say that marriage indissoluble except by Papal action is not. It is irrelevant and unfair for a soldier of light to ally himself with Philistine against Philistine. From the ideal point of meditation to which he would recall us, where the pure justice and the naked beauty of thought are alone held sacred, I cannot "find the marriage theory of Catholicism refreshing and elevating" merely because the Protestant theory, which "neither makes divorce impossible nor makes it decent," has assumed in English law-courts a gross and hideous Incarnation. What is anomalous, what is unjust, cannot surely be beautiful to purged eyes looking from "the ideal sphere." Of course the idea of a lifelong union has its beauty and significance; so has the idea of liberty and sincerity of action. Faith is good, and freedom is good; the office of the idea is to give free play and full justice to both. The Philistines on either side would fain draw sharper and harder the lines of demarcation and division; the thinkers on neither side would fain not reject but reconcile.

Again, it is doubtless the best and most direct service that a critic can do his countrymen to strip and smite their especial errors, to point out and fence off their peculiar pitfalls; and this Mr. Arnold has done for his

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