CHAPTER XIII. OUTRE-MER. CALMLY and peacefully the wintry weeks of the Christmas vacation passed away. With the solemn beauty of the valley, and the lovely grandeur of its encircling mountains round about him, Dr. Arnold rejoiced in the tranquillity of the season, and braced his mind anew for the coming toil of the Rugby duties. On one occasion he wrote to his friend, Mr. Hearn, and told him how, on the preceding night, they had all been out on the gravel walk, watching the northern lights, which he had never seen so beautiful; and how the sky in the north behind the mountains was all of a silvery light, while in other parts it was as dark as usual, and all set with stars; and how, from the masses of light, shot upwards to the zenith quivering pulses and fleeces of radiance, till they died far away in the south. And when the vacation terminated, and the time came to leave Fox How, he confessed to feeling rather sad at seeing the preparations for departure; "for," said he, "it is like going out of a very quiet cove into a very rough sea, and I am every year approaching nearer to that time of life when rest is more welcome than exertion;" but then he subjoins, with that sound and healthful tone that redeems from the slightest shadow of morbid sentimentalism his occasional pensive tendencies: "Yet, when I think of what is at stake on that rough sea, I feel that I have no right to lie in harbour idly; and indeed I do yearn, more than I can say, to be able to render some services where service is so greatly needed. It is when I indulge such wishes most keenly, and only then, that strong political differences between my friends and myself are really painful; because I feel that not only could we not act together, but there would be no sympathy, the moment I were to express anything beyond a general sense of anxiety and apprehension, in which, I suppose, all good men must share." Just before returning to Rugby, he wrote to Mr. Justice Coleridge, speaking again of some of the points at issue between himself and Keble. He could not reverence the men whom Keble reverenced; and then he says, "How does HE feel towards Luther and Milton?" He tells how he was brought up in a strong Tory family, how his first independent impressions shook his merely received notions into pieces, so that at Winchester he was well-nigh a boy Jacobin; how at sixteen he went up to Oxford, where the influences of the place, and those of the friend to whom he was writing, blew his newly-born Jacobinism to pieces, and made him once more a Tory. But when the Tories came into power, and had it their own way, he was first astonished, and finally disgusted, at language which shocked his organ of justice, and which his biblical knowledge told him must be thoroughly unchristian. And so he no longer read Clarendon, "with all the sympathy of a thorough royalist;" but inquired earnestly, and continued to inquire, after the truth, till at length light came, as it comes to all who seek it humbly and sincerely, whether it be spiritual, political, or intellectual light; and with advancing manhood arose those views which, for their liberality, their breadth, and their luminousness, have seldom, if ever, been surpassed, perhaps but rarely equalled. The school was now so full that he was compelled to refuse applications, and his influence and power steadily increased. Twelve years had elapsed since he came to Rugby, full of zeal and vigour for the new work that lay before him: there had been difficulties under which a weaker mind would probably have succumbed; there had been antagonism which would have loosened the hold of a less tenacious grasp; and there had been storms in the outer world, beneath which any spirit less ardent and unflinching would have cowered or grown supine. Now, he stood firmly and peacefully on the ground which was so peculiarly his own; an ever-increasing throng at the University owned him as their teacher and spiritual father, and the outbursts of popular clamour and invective were dying away in the distance, like the last faint peals of a receding thunderstorm. "A hundred such men-fifty, nay, ten or five, such righteous men-might save any country; might victoriously champion any cause!" said one of the most discriminating writers of the present century.* In the month of February, he was busy with his "Roman History," trying hard to make it a sort of Domesday Book of Italy, after the Roman Conquest, and writing the naval part of the first Punic war with quite an Englishman's feelings. At this time he was planning another tour, and he hesitated between two schemes, Marseilles and Naples, or Trieste and Corfu. Corfu (Corcyra), he thought, would be genuine Greece in point of climate and scenery, and a glimpse of the * Charlotte Bronté. country round about Durazzo would greatly help the campaign of Dyrrhachium. He finally decided on Rome and Naples, vid France and Northern Italy. In February, 1840, he had occasion to correspond with W. Leaper Newton, Esq., respecting a resolution for the better observance of the Sabbath, which was to be brought forward at the general meeting of the North-Midland Railway Company. He could not give his unqualified support to the resolution in question; and in expressing his regret at being unable fully to coincide with the views of his correspondent, he very naturally enters upon his own personal ideas of the Christian Sabbath. He says : : "Of course, if I held the Jewish law of the Sabbath to be binding upon us, the question would not be one of degree; but I should wish to stop all travelling on Sundays, as in itself unlawful. But holding that the Christian Lord's Day is a very different thing from the Sabbath, and to be observed in a different manner, the question of Sunday travelling is, in my mind, quite one of degree; and whilst I entirely think that the trains which travel on that day should be very much fewer on every account, yet I could not consent to suspend all travelling on a great line of communication for twenty-four hours, especially as the creation of railways necessarily puts an end to other conveyances in the same. direction; and if the trains do not travel, a poor man, who could not post, might find it impossible to get on at all. But I would cheerfully support you in voting that only a single train, each way, should travel on the Sunday, which would surely enable the clerks, porters, &c., at every station, to have the greatest part of every Sunday at their own disposal. Nay, I would gladly subscribe individually to a fund for obtaining additional help on the Sunday, so that the work might fall still lighter on each individual employed.” 'February 22nd, 1840. "I believe that it is generally agreed among Christians, that the Jewish law, so far as it was Jewish and not moral, is at an end; and it is assuming the whole point at issue to assume that the Ten Commandments are all moral. If that were so, it seems to me quite certain that the Sabbath would have been kept on its own proper day; for if the Commandments were still binding, I do not see where would be the power to make any alteration in its enactments. But it is also true, no doubt, that the Lord's Day was kept from time immemorial in the Church as a day of festival, and, connected with the notion of festival, the abstinence from worldly business naturally followed. A weekly religious festival, in which worldly business was suspended, bore such a resemblance to the Sabbath, that the analogy of the Jewish law was often urged as a reason for its observance; but as it was not considered to be the Sabbath, but only a day in some respects like it, so the manner of its observance varied from time to time, and was made more or less strict on grounds of religious expediency, without reference in either case to the authority of the fourth Commandment. . . . . I should prefer greatly diminishing public travelling on the Sunday to stopping it altogether, as this seems to me to correspond better with the Christian observance of the Lord's Day, which, while most properly making rest from ordinary occupation the general rule, yet does not regard it as a thing of absolute necessity, but to be waived on weighty grounds. And surely many very weighty reasons for occasionally moving from place to place on a Sunday are occurring constantly. But if the only alternative be between stopping the trains on a railway altogether, or having them go frequently, as on other days, I cannot hesitate for an instant which side to take, and I will send you my proxy without a moment's hesitation.” "April 1st, 1840.—I agree with you that it is not necessary, with respect to the practical point, to discuss the authority of the command to keep the Sunday. In fact, believing it to be an ordinance of the Church at any rate, I hold its practical obligation, just as much as if I considered it to be derivable from the fourth Commandment; but the main |