The first two-thirds of Thomas Arnold's essay on the interpretation of scripture is printed here. It propounds the liberal Anglican view of history which was explored by J. C. Hare, H. H. Milman, Connop Thirlwall and Arnold's pupil and biographer, A. P. Stanley. ‘It was Thomas Arnold’, says Duncan Forbes ‘who pursued the possibility of a science of history most ardently, and who alone gave his ideas of the subject any formal shape’ (The Liberal Anglican Idea of History, Cambridge 1952, p. 12).

Arnold was a romantic and a Lakist. He consulted Wordsworth about the building of his Lakeland home, Fox How, and he admired Coleridge. So his historical vision was formed by their convictions, particularly Coleridge's, which were ripe for development by historians: the universal scope, the unity, the development through time, and the duty to empathise with the apparent strangeness of the past. The all-important unity was guaranteed by robust theism. We shall see this become etiolated in the work of his son, Matthew Arnold. But for Thomas himself, divine providence was a bulwark against rationalistic historiography with its secularised belief in progress and ‘the march of mind’. Yet Arnold was not reactionary, nor even conservative. He was actively and radically concerned about the condition of England, and his emphasis on development and universality was opposed to the essentially unhistorical and decidedly reactionary thought of the Oxford Movement – polemic in which Matthew followed him vigorously.