4 - The enlargement of Christianity

Summary

High culture or ardent intelligence, pervading a large body of the community, acquire a breadth of basis … an energy of central heat for radiating fervour which they can never possess when they pervade a small upper class only. It is … such a broad basis … that … is the secret of rich and beautiful epochs in national life … and … our actual middle class … has the forerunner, the preparer, the indispensable ferment … It … has real mental ardour, real curiosity and … widespread mental movement.

(Matthew Arnold, A French Eton, 1864, pp. 105–6)

If we abandoned our belief in the supernatural, it would be not only inanimate Nature that would be left to us … Nature including Humanity would be our God. We should read his character not merely in the earthquake and fire, but also in the still small voice; not merely in the destroying powers of the world, but … in the compassion that we feel for one another … not merely in the intricate laws that confound our prudence, but in the science that penetrates them and the art which makes them subservient to our purposes; not merely in the social evils that fill our towns with misery and cover our frontiers with war, but in the St Francis that makes himself the brother of the miserable, and in the Fox and Penn that proclaim principles of peace.

(J. R. Seeley, Natural Religion, 1882, pp. 68–9)