Matthew Arnold, Civilization in the United States: First and Last Impressions of America.

[104] knowledge, a stunted sense of beauty, a low standard of manners; so in America, too, where this class is yet more important and all-pervading than it is here, civilization suffers in the like way. With a people of our stock it could not, indeed, well be otherwise, so long as this people can be truly described as “the most commonschooled and least cultivated people in the world.”

The real cultivation of the people of the United States, as of the English middle class, has been in and by its religion, its “one thing needful.” But the insufficiency of this religion is now every day becoming more manifest. It deals, indeed, with personages and words which have an indestructible and inexhaustible truth and salutariness; but it is rooted and grounded in preternaturalism, it can receive those personages and those words only on conditions of preternaturalism, and a religion of preternaturalism is doomed — whether with or without the battle of Armageddon for which Lord Salisbury is preparing — to inevitable dissolution. Fidelity to conscience! cries the popular Protestanism of Great Britain and America, and thinks that it has said enough. But the modern analysis relentlessly scrutinizes this conscience, and compels it to give an account of itself. What sort