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Russell, George William Erskine, 1853-1919

"Matthew Arnold"

Paul. And this particular direction
seems to have been given to his thoughts by a sentence, then recently
published, of Renan: "After having been for three hundred years, thanks
to Protestantism, the Christian doctor _par excellence_, Paul is now
coming to an end of his reign."
Arnold, as his manner was, fastened on these last words, and made them
the text of his treatise on _St. Paul and Protestantism_, which began to
appear in October, 1869. "_St. Paul is now coming to an end of his
reign._ Precisely the contrary, I venture to think, is the judgment to
which a true criticism of men and of things leads us. The Protestantism
which has so used and abused St. Paul is coming to an end;... but the
real reign of St. Paul is only beginning."
In _Culture and Anarchy_ he had shown how "the over-Hebraizing of
Puritanism, and its want of a wide culture, so narrow its range and
impair its vision that even the documents which it thinks
all-sufficient, and to the study of which it exclusively rivets itself,
it does not rightly understand, but is apt to make of them something
quite different from what they really are.


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