Literature and Dogma is Matthew Arnold's best work in the criticism of religion, which he believed to be the most important field in which he deployed his fine wit and penetration. For the next fifty years it exerted its influence, most notably on Anglican and Catholic modernists and on Leo Tolstoy. Its genesis, by coincidences which betray the often sudden nature of historical process, gathered around three consecutive days in the June of 1870. A review of them will serve to introduce the central part of the text which is printed here.

On June 21 the University of Oxford made Arnold Doctor of Civil Laws at its annual Commemoration. It already knew him as its Professor of Poetry, the office in which Lowth had delivered his lectures a century earlier. It was a great and very positive day for Arnold. The Chancellor, Lord Salisbury, was flattering to him. And the ‘very loud acclamations’ (The Times, 22 June 1870) which greeted him in the Sheldonian Theatre were the best possible boost to his confidence in himself as a liberal and reforming critic of society and religion. He had recently published in both fields. Culture and Anarchy came out in January 1869, St Paul and Protestantism in May 1870. Now he was a prophet honoured in his own university, the centre of so much crucial religious controversy. His mood was very different from that of the poetry of his youth.