I decisive event which underlies search for meaning and despair of it in 20th is loss of God in 19th century. Paul Tillich J. Hillis Miller has argued that Matthew thought provides us with of most important testimonies to spiritual situation of nineteenth century and perhaps quintessential transition to twentieth. Millet concludes his argument by saying that Arnold's last and most characteristic posture is that of man who waits passively and in tranquil hope for spark from heaven to fall.... He is ... survivor who has persisted unwillingly into time when all he cares for is dead (Miller, Disappearance 262). Elsewhere, Miller adds, In time when power of organized religion has weakened, people have turned, as Matthew Arnold said they would, to as and prop, even as means of salvation (Literature and Religion 34). Because Arnold believed that comes primarily through literature--and most specifically through poetry--he argued that which had traditionally informed humans about themselves and their existences, would soon be overtaken and then replaced by poetry. Arnold saw this beginning to happen in his own time, and he prophesied that [t]he future of is immense, because in ... our race ... will find an ever surer and surer stay since the strongest part of our religion, unconscious poetry (Super, IX: 161), provides us with our most certain guide. most succinct summary of his position occurs in his essay, The Study of Poetry. He wrote: More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.... [O]ur ... our philosophy, ... what are they but shadows and dreams and false shows of knowledge? day will come when we shall wonder at ourselves for having trusted to them, for having taken them seriously; and more we perceive their hollowness, more we shall prize the breath and finer spirit of knowledge offered to us by (Super, IX: 161-62). prophetic testimony for prestige of and his prediction for its future privileged status could be supported through detailed analysis of his writings, even though some of most significant of these works, in own estimation (such as books he specifically devoted to religious issues and which he himself held in high regard), are rarely read or studied today save by most diligent of Arnold specialists. (1) To use own words against him, if religious essays were, to his mind, the power of moment, they are not now the power of man. (2) But because it is finally as poet that I want to place Arnold, and particularly so in terms of later poets and of poetic progression that he initiated and put into practice, I intend to concentrate on him here primarily in terms of his and specifically in terms of his best known and one of his best poems, Dover Beach, poem that provides paradigm of personal theological as well as a symbol of Victorian dilemma (Cadbury 126) and indeed of crisis in theological thought in middle of nineteenth century. If it is case, as Miller contends, that From DeQuincey through Arnold and Browning to Hopkins, Yeats, and Stevens there is movement from absence of God to death of God as starting point and basis (Poets of Reality 283), then it might be argued that even if Arnold does not go as far back in this movement as DeQuincey, he comes almost as far forward in it as Wallace Stevens--by way of Shelley, Francis Thompson, Clough, some of Browning, Tennyson, and Rossettis, more of Swinburne, down through Hopkins, Hardy, Housman, Yeats--and as far forward as R. …