CULTURE AND ANARCHY:

AN ESSAY

IN

POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CRITICISM.

BY

MATTHEW ARNOLD.

LONDON:

SMITH, ELDER AND CO., 15, WATERLOO PLACE.

1869.

[The right of Translation is reserved.]

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PREFACE.

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