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for the next nine years, taking seven or eight young men as private pupils in preparation for the universities. In 1827, he was elected head master of the school at Rugby. On the death of Dr. Nares, in 1841, he was offered the Regius professorship of modern history at Oxford, which he accepted, without resigning his place at Rugby, and the very next year, 1842, on the 12th of June, he died, on the day that completed his forty-seventh year.

It is impossible to do justice to the intellectual, moral, and religious character of this eminently great and good man in the limits necessarily assigned to these biographical notices. No English scholar of the present century has exerted a wider or more happy influence on the literary and religious world. In whatever light we view him, either as a scholar, an historian, a schoolmaster, a theologian, or as a man, he commands our highest respect and warmest admiration.

As a scholar, Dr. Arnold was distinguished for his deep and varied learning, and for his classical attainments, which were extensive and accurate. He was particularly fond of Grecian literature, and his edition of "Thucydides" gave proof of his accurate Greek scholarship, and his discriminating taste as a critic. But what was better than all, he was a Christian scholar, and aimed to make himself and his pupils look upon knowledge not as an end, but as a means to higher and more enlarged usefulness.

As an historian, he shows in his own most instructive "Lectures on Modern History," in his "History of Rome," and of "The Later Roman Commonwealth," what history ought to be, and how it should be studied. His "History of Rome" is undoubtedly the best history in the language; and to its composition the author brought the very highest qualifications of learning and of religious principle. "He saw God in history, and felt that righteousness exalts a nation, and that sin is not merely a reproach to a people, but that it introduces rottenness and decay into its very heart."

It was as a schoolmaster, however, that Dr. Arnold was strikingly great. "Teaching was the business of his life, and in instruction his greatness was most conspicuous. His spirit was instinct with generous sympathy, which delights in contact with the freshness and ardor of youth." When he entered Rugby School, it was at a very low ebb, but it soon rose rapidly in public estimation, and the success of its pupils at the universities was marked and striking. He was not only an admirable scholar and skilful instructor, but he had that enthusiastic love for literature, and of every thing that tends to exalt and purify our nature, which seldom fails to inspire with the same ardor all minds that are susceptible of it. Yet his pupils were indebted to him for something far more valuable than learning, or the love of learning; for his constant, and, for the most part, successful endeavors to implant in their minds the noblest principles, the most just sentiments, not by precept only, but by that without which precepts are generally unavailing-example.

As a theologian, Dr. Arnold was truly catholic in his views. He had little regard for systems of theology; but he went to the fountain head, and, in his interpretation and application of the Scriptures, he so signalized himself that, in

Read an excellent article on Dr. Arnold in the 5th volume of the "New Englander;" also, "Edinburgh Review," lxxvi. 357, and “North British Review," ii. 403.

the judgment of his friends, this was the sphere for which he was most highly fitted to shine with eminent usefulness. In theological controversy, he showed great ability and exerted great influence. He was a reformer in church and state, and to REFORM he consecrated his most earnest zeal.

As a man, he was remarkable for the uniform sweetness, the patience, and the forbearing meekness of his disposition. It was his constant aim to bring his religious principles into the daily practice of life, not by the continued introduction of religious phraseology, but by a single-hearted study to realize the Christian character. He was an ardent lover of truth, and when he found it, he uttered it with the utmost fearlessness. "He was an innate Christian; the bad passions might almost be said to have been omitted in his constitution. But his truth and honesty were unflinchingly regardless of his own interest, or of temporary consequences." Such is an imperfect outline of the character of this great and good man.1

"Our readers must pass a day with Arnold. They will see of how homely and plain a thread, to all appearance, it was composed. Only, to make it more impressive, the day we will choose shall be his last. It differs in itself in no respect from other days, except as it is more of a holiday, since it happens to be also the concluding day of the half year. On the morrow he was to shake his wings for Westmoreland. The morning is taken up with an examination in Ranke's History of the Popes.' Then come the distribution of prizes, the taking leave of the boys who are going, and all the mechanical details of finishing for the holidays; his usual walk and bath follow; dinner next, where he talked with great pleasure to several guests of his early geological studies under Buckland, and of a recent visit to Naseby with Thomas Carlyle. An interval in the evening leaves room for an earnest conversation with an old pupil on some differences in their views of the Tractarian theology; after which, the day rounds off with an annual supper to some of the sixth-form boys. Arnold retired to bed, apparently in perfect health. But before laying down his head upon the pillow, from which he was never more to raise it, he put his seal upon this busy and cheerful day by an entry in his diary, which (reading it as we now read it) seems of prophetic

1 "He will strike those who study him more closely, as a complete character-complete in its union of moral and intellectual gifts, and in the steady growth and development of both: for his greatness did not consist in the pre-eminence of any single quality, but in several remarkable powers, thoroughly leavened and pervaded by an ever-increasing moral nobleness. He was not one of those men who, beginning well, are stunted in mind and in heart at a certain age-often, perhaps, because their thoughts are at war with their feelings-because the latter are not fresh and pure enough to give vigor and manliness to the former. It was the very reverse of this with Arnold; the same holy objects on which his affections were unceasingly fixed-the same great subjects of moral and intellectual interest-the same simple and innocent pleasures are seen, as it were, sensibly growing in almost every successive letter, from the first days at Laleham to the last at Rugby. Connected with, and, indeed, an instance of this completeness and consistency of character is the concentration of his thoughts and interests on a few great moral subjects, which, if it diminished his intellectual breadth, yet increased the intenseness of his moral and intellectual vision."-Quarterly Review, ixxiv. 507.

"The basis of Arnold's morale reminds us of all we know of that of another celebrated schoolmaster, (not very popular in his day, and no great favorite with high churchmen;) we mean John Milton. There is the same purity and directness about them both; the same predominance of the graver, not to say sterner, elements; the same confidence, vehemence, and elevation. They both so lived in their great Task-Master's eye,' as to verify Bacon's observation in his Essay on Atheism,'-made themselves of kin to God in spirit, and raised their nature by means of a higher nature than their own.”—Edinburgh Review, lxxxi. 202.

import. Yet, in truth, these transitions had become so familiar to him that, in passing from what was most spiritual, he was hardly conscious of the change. He kept the communication between this world and the next so freely open-angels ascending and descending-that he blended the influences of both, of things temporal and things eternal, into one consistent whole :

FROM HIS JOURNAL.

Saturday Evening, June 11.-The day after to-morrow is my birthday, if I am permitted to live to see it-my forty-seventh birthday since my birth. How large a portion of my life on earth is already passed! And then-what is to follow this life? How visibly my outward work seems contracting and softening away into the gentler employments of old age. In one sense, how nearly can I now say "Vixi;" and I thank God that, as far as ambition is concerned, it is, I trust, fully mortified. I have no desire other than to step back from my present place in the world, and not to rise to a higher, Still there are works which, with God's permission, I would do before the night cometh, especially that great work, if I might be permitted to take part in it. But, above all, let me mind my own personal work, to keep myself pure, and zealous, and believinglaboring to do God's will, yet not anxious that it should be done by me rather than by others, if God disapproves of my doing it.

"What a midnight epitaph! How ominous and how unconscious! How tender and sublime! He woke next morning, between five and six, in pain. It was angina pectoris. At eight o'clock he was dead!"1

THE OXFORD CONSPIRATORS.

On the character of no party does history throw so full and clear a light as on the high-church party of the Church of England-the party of the Oxford conspirators. Unlike the political Tories, who are only analogously like the Tories of the Revolution, by being as much in the rear of the existing generation as the old Tories were in the rear of theirs, these church Tories have stirred neither actually nor relatively; they are the very Nonjurors and high church clergy of King William's, and Anne's, and George the First's reign reproduced, with scarcely a shade of difference. Now, as then, this party is made up of two elements-of the Hophni and Phinehas school, on the one hand-the mere low worldly clergy, careless and grossly ignorant-ministers not of the gospel, but of the aristocracy, who belong to Christianity only from the accident of its being established by law; and of the formalist Judaizing

"Edinburgh Review," lxxxi. 198.

fanatics, on the other hand, who have ever been the peculiar disgrace of the Church of England; for these high church fanatics have imbibed, even of fanaticism itself, nothing but the folly and the virulence. Other fanatics have persecuted, like the Romanists, in order to uphold a magnificent system, which, striking its roots deep and stretching its branches wide, exercises a vast influence over the moral condition of man, and may almost excuse some extravagance of zeal in its behalf. Others, again, have been fanatics for freedom, and for what they deemed the due authority of God's own word. They were violent against human ceremonies-they despised learning-they cast away the delicacies, and almost the humanities of society, for the sake of asserting two great principles, noble even in their exaggeration entire freedom towards man, and entire devotion towards God. But the fanaticism of the English high churchman has been the fanaticism of mere foolery. A dress, a ritual, a name, a ceremony; a technical phraseology; the superstition of a priesthood without its power; the form of episcopal government, without the substance; a system imperfect and paralyzed, not independent, not sovereign-afraid to cast off the subjection against which it is perpetually murmuring. Such are the objects of high church fanaticism, objects so pitiful that, if gained ever so completely, they would make no man the wiser or the better; they would lead to no good, intellectual, moral, or spiritual; to no effect, social or religious, except to the changing of sense into silliness, and holiness of heart and life into formality and hypocrisy.

Once, however, and once only, in the history of Christianity, do we find a heresy-for never was that term more justly applied-so degraded and low-principled as this. We must pass over the times of Romanists-we must go back to the very beginning of the Christian church, and there, in the Jews and Judaizers of the New Testament, we find the only exact resemblance to the high churchman of Oxford. In the zealots of circumcision and the ceremonies of the. law-in the slanderers and persecutors of St. Paul-the doters upon old wives' fables and endless genealogies-the men of "soft words and fair speeches"-of a "voluntary humility," all the time that they were calumniating and opposing the gospel and its great apostle in the malignant fanatics who, to the number of more than forty, formed a conspiracy to assassinate Paul, because he had denied the necessity of ceremonies to salvation- "the men of mint, and anise, and cumin," who cared not for judgment, mercy, and truth-the enemies and revilers of the holiest names which earth reverences, and who are condemned, in the most emphatic language, by that authority which all Christians acknowledge as divine-in these, and in these alone, can the party which has headed the late Oxford conspiracy find their perfect prototype.

THE WORLD OUR COUNTRY.

But here that feeling of pride and selfishness interposes, which, under the name of patriotism, has so long tried to pass itself off for a virtue. As men, in proportion to their moral advancement, learn to enlarge the circle of their regards; as an exclusive affection for our relations, our clan, or our country, is a sure mark of an unimproved mind; so is that narrow and unchristian feeling to be condemned which regards with jealousy the progress of foreign nations, and cares for no portion of the human race but that to which itself belongs. The detestable encouragement so long given to national enmities the low gratification felt by every people in extolling themselves above their neighbors-should not be forgotten amongst the causes which have mainly obstructed the improvement of mankind.

Exclusive patriotism should be cast off, together with the exclusive ascendency of birth, as belonging to the follies and selfishness of our uncultivated nature. Yet, strange to say, the former at least is upheld by men who not only call themselves Christians, but are apt to use the charge of irreligion as the readiest weapon against those who differ from them. So little have they learned of the spirit of that Revelation which taught emphatically the abolition of an exclusively national religion and a local worship, that so men, being all born of the same blood, might make their sympathies coextensive with their bond of universal brotherhood.

Appendix to Thucydides, vol. i.

It is astonishing how, amid all his public duties, Dr. Arnold found time to maintain such an extensive epistolary correspondence; and I think it would be difficult if not impossible to find so many wise and practical remarks upon men and things, in religion, literature, politics, &c., in the letters of any other English author, as are to be found in his letters. From them I select the following-detached, indeed, but most suggestive and instructive sentiments :

THE ENCOURAGEMENTS AND DISCOURAGEMENTS OF THE

SCHOOLMASTER.2

To Sir J. Pasley-1828.

Since I began this letter, I have had some of the troubles of school-keeping, and one of those specimens of the evils of boy

Read "Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D.D., by Arthur P. Stanley, M. A." 2 vols. a most interesting and instructive work.

"The diligent and pious teacher, who properly instructeth and traineth the young, cần never be fully rewarded with money. If I were to leave my office as preacher, I would next choose that of schoolmaster, or teacher, for I know that, next to preaching, this is the greatest, best, and most useful vocation; and I am not quite sure which of the two is the better, for it is hard to reform old sinners, with whom the preacher has to do, while the young tree can be made to bend without breaking."-MARTIN LUTHER.

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