Matthew Arnold wrote at a time when English life and English thought were much in need of broadening their horizons and throwing off the shackles of a narrow provincialism. Life was characterized by a certain dryness both of intellect and emotion, which was especially shown in the religion and science of the period. The Oxford movement was in some sense a protest against this attitude of mind, and Arnold, although in a very different way, uttered as strong a plea for a richer and more wide reaching spiritual life. His mission to Englishmen was, as he explains in the preface to one of his volumes of essays, to help them conquer the hard unintelligence, which was just then their bane; to supple and reduce it by culture.