CULTURE AND ANARCHY: AN ESSAY IN POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CRITICISM
Book Description
CULTURE AND ANARCHY: AN ESSAY IN POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CRITICISM
1869, FIRST EDITION
MATTHEW ARNOLD
CONTENTS
Preface: iii-lx
I: 1-50 (Sweetness and Light)
II: 51-92 (Doing as One Likes)
III: 93-141 (Barbarians, Philistines, Populace)
IV: 142-166 (Hebraism and Hellenism)
V: 166-197 (Porro Unum est Necessarium)
VI: 197-272 (Our Liberal Practitioners)
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MoreCULTURE AND ANARCHY: AN ESSAY IN POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CRITICISM
1869, FIRST EDITION
MATTHEW ARNOLD
CONTENTS
Preface: iii-lx
I: 1-50 (Sweetness and Light)
II: 51-92 (Doing as One Likes)
III: 93-141 (Barbarians, Philistines, Populace)
IV: 142-166 (Hebraism and Hellenism)
V: 166-197 (Porro Unum est Necessarium)
VI: 197-272 (Our Liberal Practitioners)
CULTURE AND ANARCHY (1869, FIRST EDITION)
PREFACE
[iii] My foremost design in writing this Preface is to address a word
of exhortation to the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. In
the essay which follows, the reader will often find Bishop Wilson
quoted. To me and to the members of the Society for Promoting
Christian Knowledge his name and writings are still, no doubt,
familiar; but the world is fast going away from old-fashioned people
of his sort, and I learnt with consternation lately from a brilliant
and distinguished votary of the natural sciences, that he had never
so much as heard of Bishop Wilson, and that he imagined me to have
invented him. At a moment when the Courts of Law have just taken off
the embargo from the recreative religion furnished on Sundays by my
gifted acquaintance and others, and when St. Martin's Hall [iv] and
the Alhambra will soon be beginning again to resound with their
pulpit-eloquence, it distresses one to think that the new lights
should not only have, in general, a very low opinion of the preachers
of the old religion, but that they should have it without knowing the
best that these preachers can do. And that they are in this case is
owing in part, certainly, to the negligence of the Christian
Knowledge Society. In old times they used to print and spread abroad
Bishop Wilson's Maxims of Piety and Christianity; the copy of this
work which I use is one of their publications, bearing their imprint,
and bound in the well-known brown calf which they made familiar to
our childhood; but the date of my copy is 1812. I know of no copy
besides, and I believe the work is no longer one of those printed and
circulated by the Society. Hence the error, flattering, I own, to me
personally, yet in itself to be regretted, of the distinguished
physicist already mentioned.
But Bishop Wilson's Maxims deserve to be circulated as a religious
book, not only by comparison with the cartloads of rubbish circulated
at present under this designation, but for their own sake, and even
by comparison with the other works of the same [v] author. Over the
far better known Sacra Privata they have this advantage, that they
were prepared by him for his own private use, while the Sacra Privata
were prepared by him for the use of the public. The Maxims were
never meant to be printed, and have on that account, like a work of,
doubtless, far deeper emotion and power, the Meditations of Marcus
Aurelius, something peculiarly sincere and first-hand about them.
Some of the best things from the Maxims have passed into the Sacra
Privata; still, in the Maxims, we have them as they first arose; and
whereas, too, in the Sacra Privata the writer speaks very often as
one of the clergy, and as addressing the clergy, in the Maxims he
almost always speaks solely as a man. I am not saying a word against
the Sacra Privata, for which I have the highest respect; only the
Maxims seem to me a better and a more edifying book still. They
should be read, as Joubert says Nicole should be read, with a direct
aim at practice. The reader will leave on one side things which,
from the change of time and from the changed point of view which the
change of time inevitably brings with it, no longer suit him; enough
[vi] will remain to serve as a sample of the very best, perhaps,
which our nation and race can do in the way of religious writing.
Publisher | |
Binding | Kindle Edition (53 editions) |
Reading Level | Uncategorized
|
# of Pages | N/A |
ISBN-10 | B0041KKL7C |
Publication Date | 08/31/2010 |
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