Fellowes to send you my new volume of Sermons, as to a man who might not and would not agree with all that he found there, but yet would not be shocked at it, but would believe that it was intended to serve the same cause to which he was himself devoted. And I have had the full intention of writing to you as in times past, if you again sailed to India, or if you remained in England; of which intention be this present letter the first fruits and pledge. . CCLXXXI. TO THE SAME. Fox How, August 12, 1841. I thank you very much for your letter, although, to say the truth, there were some expressions in it which a little disappointed me. I do not know, in point of fact, what our differences of opinion are, and with regard to Newmanism, I had supposed that we were mostly in agreement. I should have expected, therefore, that generally you would have agreed with the Introduction to my last volume; and that your differences would have been rather with some parts of the appendices. But I do not mean by disappointment the finding more or less of disagreement in opinion, but much more the finding that you still look upon the disagreement, be it what it may, as a serious matter, by which I understand you to mean a thing deserving of moral censure; as if, for example, one had a friend whom one respected and loved for many good qualities, but whose temper was so irritable, that it made a considerable abatement in one's estimate of him. Of course, he who believes his own views to be true, must believe the opposite views to be error; but the great point in our judgment and feeling towards men seems to be not to confound error with fault. I scarcely know one amongst my dearest friends, except Bunsen, whom I do not believe to be in some point or other in grave error: I differ very widely from Whately on many points, as I differ from you and from Keble on others; but the sense of errors is with me something quite distinct from the sense of fault, and if I were required to name Keble's faults or yours, it would never enter into my head to think of his Newmanism or your opinions, whatever they may be, which differ from my own. The fault would be, in my judgment, and you will forgive me for saying so, the feeling as Keble does, and as I hoped that you now did not, towards an error as if it were a fault, and judging it morally. We are speaking, you will observe, of such errors as are consistent with membership, not only in Christianity, bat in the same particular Church; and I cannot think that we have a right to regard such as faults, though we have quite a right a right which I would largely exercise, to protest against them as mischievous-mischievous, it may be, in a very high degree, as I think Newmanism is. CCLXXXII. TO THE SAME. Fox How, September 22, 1841. I most write a few lines to you before we leave Fox How, because my first arrival at Rugby is likely to be beset with business, and I fear that your time of sailing is drawing near. Most heartily do I thank you for your last letter, and you may be sure that I will not trouble you on the subject any farther. Nor do I feel it necessary, for although it may be that there is something which I could wish otherwise still. yet I feel now that it need not and will not disturb our intercourse, and therefore I can write to you with perfect content. You are going again to your work, which I feel sure is and will be blessed both to others and yourself. I should be well pleased if one of my sons went out hereafter to labour in the same field, but what line they will take seems very hard to determine. They do not seem inclined to follow Medicine, and I have the deepest abhorrence of the Law, so that two professions seem set aside, and for trade. I have neither capital nor connexion. Meanwhile I wish them to do well at the University, which will be an arming them in a manner for whatever may open to them. We shall leave this place, I think, on Friday. This long stay has doubly endeared it to us all, and though I am thankful to be able to get back to Rugby, yet there will be a sad wrench in leaving Fox How. It is not the mere outward beauty, but the friendliness and agreeableness of the neighbourhood in which we mix, simply as inhabitants of the country, and not as at Rugby, in an official relation. The school is summoned for the 9th of October, but many of the boys will return, I think, on Saturday, so that the work will begin probably on Monday; but as I have some of the Sixth Form down here, I have not the leisure for my History I could have desired. I trust that you will go on with your Journal, and that you will hereafter allow large portions of it to be printed. I am persuaded that it will do more towards enabling us to realize India to ourselves, than anything which has yet appeared. CHAPTER X. LAST YEAR.-PROFESSORSHIP OF MODERN HISTORY AT OXFORD. -LAST DAYS AT RUGBY.-DEATH.-CONCLUSION. It was now the fourteenth year of Dr. Arnold's stay at Rugby. The popular prejudice against him, which for the last few years had been rapidly subsiding, now began actually to turn in his favour; his principles of education, which at one time had provoked so much outcry, met with general acquiescence ;-the school, with each successive half-year, rose in numbers beyond the limit within which he endeavoured to confine it, and seemed likely to take a higher rank than it had ever assumed before; -the alarm which had once existed against him in the theological world was now directed to an opposite quarter;-his fourth volume of Sermons, with its Introduction, had been hailed by a numerous party with enthusiastic approbation; and many who had long hung back from him with suspicion and dislike, now seemed inclined to gather round him as their champion and leader. His own views and objects meanwhile remained the same. But the feeling of despondency, with which for some time past he had regarded public affairs, now assumed a new phase, which, though it might possibly have passed away with the natural course of events, coloured his mind too strongly during this period to be passed over without notice. His interest, indeed, in political and ecclesiastical matters still continued; and his sermon on Easter Day, 1842, stands almost if not absolutely alone in the whole course of his school sermons, for the severity and vehemence of its denunciations connexion between truth and goodness which he had always insisted upon, seemed to come before him with peculiar force from time to time in these his latest thoughts. In one of the last school Essays revised by him, it was recollected with what peculiar emphasis he had written at the close of it," not," as he said, "because there was any particular place for it in the composition itself, but because he wished to say something about it," the words, "Tum demum id quod Verum est a Bono alienum licebit dicere, cum Deum a Mundo sustulerimus." In his latest lessons it was observed how, in reading Plato's Republic, he brake out into a solemn protest against the evil effects of an exaggerated craving after Unity-or in Cicero's work, "De Divinatione," the contrast that he drew between the conduct of the later philosophers and the Christian martyrs with regard to the established religion. "Neither of the two parties believed in it but the philosophers and augurs worshipped and sacrificed because they thought it convenient to uphold the ‘instituta majorum;'-just as in Roman Catholic countries there are to be found men who would laugh at the most solemn parts of the service, at the mass itself-who would burn a Protestant, but who believe in Christ just as much as Cicero believed in Him. But they could not understand why the Christians would not act as they did they had no notion of men dying rather than act a lie and deny what they were certain was a truth. It is this which shows us what martyrdom really was, and in what the nobleness of the martyrs consisted-in that they would die sooner than by their slightest action assist in what they felt to be a lie and a mockery." And,—whilst in his latest studies of early Christian history, in the Epistles of Cyprian, he dwelt on this endurance and self-devotion of the early martyrs with an increasing sympathy and admiration, which penetrated even into his private devotions, and on the instruction to be derived from contemplating an age "when martyrdom was a real thing to which every Christian might, without any remarkable accident, be exposed," he was also much struck with the indications which these Epistles seemed to him to contain, that the Church had been corrupted not only by the Judaic spirit of a See Serm. vol. v. p. 316. |