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Matthew Arnold was the noble son of a nobler sire, from whose high faith he fell. His culture was of such a type as brings men toward agnosticism and tinges life and literature with gloom and hopelessness. Early in the son's career his father expressed to Lord Coleridge serious misgivings about the lack of any evangelical spirit in Matthew's writings. How grieved Arnold of Rugby would have been had he lived to hear his son say he was going to observe Christmas Day "because the incarnation was a myth of purity refining to family life." Though doubtless Thomas Arnold would be comforted could he know that his boy, at the end of life and on its very last day, was overheard repeating to himself, while descending the stairs in a friend's house, that fervid, humble, and adoring hymn of the Evangelical Faith, inexpressibly dear to multitudes of the faithful:

"When I survey the wondrous cross

On which the Prince of glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss,
And pour contempt on all my pride.

"Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast,

Save in the death of Christ, my God;
All the vain things that charm me most,
I sacrifice them to his blood.

"See, from his head, his hands, his feet,
Sorrow and love flow mingled down:
Did e'er such love and sorrow meet,

Or thorns compose so rich a crown?

"Were the whole realm of nature mine,

That were a present far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,

Demands my soul, my life, my all."

In repeating this hymn Matthew Arnold was approving the faith and the creed of Isaac Watts. An Oxford scholar and teacher writes that Arnold gave up infidel views toward the end of his life; and Moffat, the famous biblicist, states that Arnold's Testament had such verses as these marked: "Whosoever taketh not up his cross and followeth me, he cannot be my disciple"; "Whosoever would save his life must lose it.”

GLIMPSES OF THE SOUL OF GILDER

WRITE "Richard Watson Gilder" on any page and you turn the rest of that page into the setting for a jewel. To coin the air into the syllables of his name is to transmute oxygen and nitrogen into additional gold currency for the world. Of religious parentage and education, his soul was true till death to the faith of his fathers, and his ancestral church was ever dear to him. Even Professor George E. Woodberry detects and comments on the persistence of the essentially Wesleyan note in his poetry:

"Much of Gilder's verse is exhortatory; there are many hymns and private prayers. It will surprise those who are not familiar with his poetry as a whole to find how preoccupied it is with religious questions. God, Christ, immortality, sin, and sorrow-these are constant in his brooding; and amid the strangely mingled veins there is always something that harks back to the old faith, the childish nurture, the large hope. In some things he was nigh to Wesley, and it shows in the various voices of his verse, in his belief in the beneficence of sorrow, which is most Christian, in his philanthropy, in his humilities, in his fervency. The chrism of his birth is on him, and, however enfranchised, he always speaks as a child of his old church.”

To speak of the soul of Gilder is eminently fit and proper, for above all things else he "believed in soul, was very sure of God," made the most of his own soul and of the souls of others. At a gathering of physical scientists, talking with some of them, he said, "I'm interested chiefly in things of the spirit; my study is the soul." "Well," laughed one of them, "you may search me." Gilder's reply to this is in his verses entitled "Souls," published in the Atlantic Monthly, voicing his incredulity that high souls perish like beasts of the field or the jungle. It was utterly incredible to him that all the high potencies that throbbed in human souls, and the intensive fires that made them men, not stones nor stars nor trees nor creeping things, and gave identity to every soul, making it individual and alone among myriads, could slip out of being and be lost, eternally extinguished and blotted out. Before he himself went he gave order: "Call me not dead when I have gone into the company of the ever-living."

In most cases ancestry counts for much. When young David went forth against Goliath, King Saul said to Abner, the captain of the host, "Inquire thou whose son the stripling is." Captain Abner failed to ascertain and report; but the king attached so much importance to the matter that when the stripling came back from the fight and stood before the king with the giant's head in his hand, Saul said, "Whose son art thou,

young man?" And David answered, "I am the son of thy servant Jesse, the Bethlehemite." In the royal mind this was of some significance. And whatever the dogmatic or dubitating scientists may teach concerning heredity, the question, "Whose son is he?" is always pertinent and the answer is often enlightening, partly because parentage generally determines early environment, partly also because the propensities and masterpassions of the father are as apt to surge in the blood of the son as parental features are to reappear in the face of offspring.

Richard Watson Gilder was the son of the Rev. William H. Gilder, a member of the New York East Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and was the natural and normal product of a ministerial home. The Christian virtues, integrities, and graces were the guardian angels, intimate comrades of his childhood. His youth grew in knowledge and wisdom under the inspiration and tutelage of ideals high and pure and large-ideals intellectual, ethical, and altruistic. Loudest of all inviting voices and most alluring of all lures in the surroundings of his young life was the call of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good, to whose fine fosterings his soul was so responsive, docile, and dutiful that they gave tone and color to his whole life, their influence becoming more and more overmastering as his years passed into their declining decades.

Not only the quality of Gilder's soul but the

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