Transformed religion: Matthew Arnold and the refining of dissent

Renascence, Winter 2001 by Ward, David A

Like his father, Matthew Arnold was willing to accept Dissenters in the Church, where he himself worshiped throughout his life, and was at the same time contemptuous of their ways of thinking and acting. Although his personal faith was much less fixed and dogmatic than that of many of his countrymen-indeed, he became a notorious free-thinker on matters of religion-his support of the State Church was unequivocal. As Stefan Collini notes, the words "national" and "public" always have positive connotations in his texts (72). It is significant that Arnold devoted so many years of his life to work as a civil servant, beginning in 1851 a thirty-five year career as an Inspector of Schools; his willingness to assume such a demanding position, which required long hours and much travel, was surely motivated, at least in part, by his commitment to the attitudes and values inherent in the Establishment and a desire to see them more widely diffused in the national community. Lionel Trilling describes his acceptance of the school inspectorship, which gave him, among other things, a thorough firsthand acquaintance with the culture of Nonconformity, as a "philosophical gesture" (160). And the same might be said of his considerable efforts, fairly late in his career, to produce a new version of the Old Testament book of Isaiah suitable for use in school curricula, the notes to which reveal his preference for a unifying, nondivisive approach to religious teaching (apRoberts 254).

Strong, centralized institutional authority was especially important, Arnold felt, in a time of social and religious factionalism, when an unchecked sectarian impulse threatened to splinter the Christian community into a welter of opposing camps, each mindlessly pursuing the great English enterprise of "doing as one likes," a phrase that echoes throughout Culture and Anarchy. Dissenters like John Angell James of Carr's Lane Chapel were proclaiming that "it is every man's indefensible right, and incumbent duty, to form and to follow his own opinion of the meaning of the word of God" (133). But Arnold believed that by enshrining individual freedom and personal choice without giving due attention to what is accomplished with that freedom and choice, the midVictorian nation was becoming mentally and spiritually impoverished, unable to discriminate between worthy goals and worthless claptrap. For many, all that was needed for propositions to be credible was that a person "says them decisively, and has a large following of some strong kind when he says them" (Culture and Anarchy 111). Complaints such as these on Arnold's part evidence not only his well-known anxiety about England's expanding democracy, in the wake of passage of the Second Reform Bill and the Hyde Park riots of 1867, but his uneasiness over phenomena like the Moody and Sankey revivals of the same year and Spurgeon's large Metropolitan Tabernacle (completed in 1861), which was then thriving in London.

And for every large tabernacle, there were many more inconspicuous chapels springing up, each largely unrooted in institutional tradition and unattached to any ecclesiastical hierarchy. Arnold bemoaned this "endless splitting into hole-and-corner churches," whose existence was defined by a stubborn separatist mentality and whose congregants were cut off from the main streams of national life (28); they went about their small worlds of sermons, tea meetings, and petty disputes, blind to any higher notions of beauty and wisdom and to "the variety and fullness of human existence" (14-15). Given Dissenters' increasing numbers, their ignorance and divisive temper of mind were, he believed, doing serious harm to the nation, putting human perfection "farther off out of our reach" and increasing "the confusion and perplexity in which our society now labours" (11). High on their list of specific offenses, in his thinking, was their furious opposition to educational reforms, such as those contained in Sir James Graham's factory bill of 1843, which foundered after debates arose over the nature of the religious instruction it would provide. Furthermore, Dissenters' seeming insensibility to the life of the mind, encouraged by sweeping pulpit pronouncements against fiction and literature, was obviously antithetical to his view of culture as the "great help" for the nation's problems. "Certainly we consider them to be in the main, at present, an obstacle to progress and to true civilization," Arnold declared definitively in St. Paul and Protestantism (74).