This Paper had its origin in three main considerations: (1) my observation of the many references to Thomas Arnold's ideas and works in Matthew Arnold's familiar correspondence; (2) my recognition of many striking parallels in the Biblical criticism of the two men; and (3) my gradual realization that the great wealth of scholarship about the Arnolds contained no detailed attempt to indicate the precise nature of Matthew's indebtedness to his father's ideas about the Bible. The unlikeliness of any unique indebtedness is, of course, patent when one considers the wide diffusion of liberal religious ideas in mid-nineteenth-century England and, more particularly, when he remembers Matthew's expressions of interest on various occasions in the work of Spinoza, John Smith (the Cambridge Platonist), S. T. Coleridge, C. C. J. Bunsen, Renan, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, and Benjamin Jowett. Nevertheless, the inherent probability of at least a contributory influence, a predisposition to accept similar ideas from other sources, appeared to justify a comparative study of the criticism of the Arnolds.