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In the article, Arnold asserts that, although a belief in miracles must be lost, one must, at the same time, retain Christian morals. To lose Christian morals is to imperil oneself, and needlessly. What men need most, he maintains, is an understanding of what the essential facts and truths of Christianity really are, not a literal belief in the miraculous or preternatural.
The two Christian virtues with which he is most concerned in the essay are pureness and charity. The virgin birth he regards as "the popular homage to a high ideal of pureness," a virtue recognized by such lofty spirits as Plato, Sophocles, and Goethe. The ideal of pureness is the force needed to oppose lubricity, which brings moral confusion. (For a penetrating exposition of Arnold's attitude toward lubricity, see Lionel Trilling, Matthews Arnold [1939], pp. 344-346.)
In discussing charity, Arnold insists that both rich and poor must prefer the common good to private possession and personal enjoyment. If they do not, they will be unable to make part of the ideal society of the future. He finds the virtue of charity in the ascendency, especially "in the framing of laws and in the interpretation of them by tribunals," where "regard to property and privilege used to be . . . paramount, and the idea of the common good hardly coinsidered at all.... An acceleration of progress in the spread of ideas of this kind " Arnold says, "a decline of vitality in institutions where the opposite ideas were paramount, marks the close of a period. Jesus announced for his own period such a close; a close necessitated by the emergence of the new, the decay of the old." (St. Paul and Protestantism [1889], p. 170.) Jesus, Arnold insists, did not announce the end of the world, but rather the end of the age. In looking over the society of his own time, Arnold is inclined to augur that the social organization of the 1880's is not far from such end of the age. Dissolution will be peaceful, he says, if men have virtue enough, and violent if they are vicious.
The essay, then, is a plea for an ideal society, one that conforms "to the line of Jesus"; for the attainment of such a future, each member of society must mend himself, must implant within him the two central virtues of Christianity, pureness and charity.
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