"Terms
which with St. Paul are _literary_ terms, theologians have employed as
if they were _scientific_ terms." In saying this he goes no further than
several of his predecessors and contemporaries on the Liberal side in
theology. Even so orthodox a divine as Dr. Vaughan laid it down that
"Nothing in the Church's history has been more fertile in discord and
error than the tendency of theologians to stereotype metaphor."[49]
Bishop Hampden's much-criticised Bampton Lectures had merely aimed at
stating the accepted doctrines in terms other than those derived from
schoolmen and mataphysicians. Dean Stanley's unrivalled powers of
literary exposition were consistently employed in the same endeavour. To
call Abraham a Sheikh was only an ingenious attempt at naturalizing
Genesis. But in _Literature and Dogma_ Arnold applies this method far
more fundamentally. According to him, even "God" is a literary term to
which a scientific sense has been arbitrarily applied. He pronounces,
without waiting to prove, that there is absolutely no foundation in
reason for the idea that God is a "Person, the First Great Cause, the
moral and intelligent Governor of the Universe.
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