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But whatever the deity which satisfied Arnold's personal experience may have been, the religion which he gives us in Literature and Dogma and God and the Bible is neither Deism nor bare Pan-Deism, but a diluted Positivism. As an ethical system it is in theory admirable, but its positive value is in the highest degree questionable. Pascal's judgment upon the God who emerged from the philosophical investigations of Rene Descartes was that He was a God who was unnecessary. And one may with even greater truth say that the man who is able to receive and live by the religion which Arnold offers him is no longer in need of its help and stimulus. To be able to appreciate an ethical idealism a man must himself be already an ethical idealist.
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William Harbutt Dawson, Matthew Arnold and His Relation to the Thought of Our Time (1904, republished 1977), p. 256 (1977 ed.) ISBN: 0849206480; (1904 ed.) ASIN: B0006ADKGA.

 

Matthew Arnold

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