he said, "may be better in itself, but I am placed in this system, and am bound to try what I can make of it."

With his usual undoubting confidence in what he believed to be a general law of Providence, he based his whole management of the school on his early-formed and yearly-increasing conviction that what he had to look for, both intellectually and morally, was not performance but promise; that the very freedom and independence of school life, which in itself he thought so dangerous, might be made the best preparation for, Christian manhood; and he did not hesitate to apply to his scholars the principle which seemed to him to have been adopted in the training of the childhood of the human race itself. He shrunk from pressing on the conscience of boys rules of action which he felt they were not yet able to bear, and from enforcing actions which, though right in themselves, would in boys be performed from wrong motives. Keenly as he felt the risk and fatal consequences of the failure of this trial, still it was his great, sometimes his only support to believe that "the character is braced amid such scenes to a greater beauty and firmness than it ever can attain without enduring and witnessing them. Our work here would be absolutely unendurable if we did not bear in mind that we should look forward as well as backward—if we did not remember that the victory of fallen man lies not in innocence but in tried virtue." (Serm. vol. iv. p. 7.) "I hold fast," he said, "to the great truth, that 'blessed is he that overcometh;'" and he writes in 1837:"Of all the painful things connected with my employment, nothing is equal to the grief of seeing a boy come to school innocent and promising, and tracing the corruption of his character from the influence of the temptations around him, in the very place which ought to have strengthened and improved it. But in most cases those who come with a character of positive good are benefited; it is the neutral and indecisive characters which are apt to be decided for evil by schools, as they would be in fact by any other temptation."

But this very feeling led him with the greater eagerness to

Sermons, vol. ii. p. 440.

catch at every means, by which the trial might be shortened or alleviated. "Can the change from childhood to manhood be hastened, without prematurely exhausting the faculties of body or mind?" (Serm. vol. iv. p. 19) was one of the chief questions on which his mind was constantly at work, and which in the judgment of some he was disposed to answer too readily in the affirmative. It was with the elder boys, of course, that he chiefly acted on this principle, but with all above the very young ones he trusted to it more or less. Firmly as he believed that a time of trial was inevitable, he believed no less firmly that it might be passed at public schools sooner than under other circumstances; and, in proportion as he disliked the assumption of a false manliness in boys, was his desire to cultivate in them true manliness, as the only step to something higher, and to dwell on earnest principle and moral thoughtfulness, as the great and distinguishing mark between good and evila. Hence his wish that as much as possible should be done by the boys, and nothing for them; hence arose his practice, in which his own delicacy of feeling and uprightness of purpose powerfully assisted him, of treating the boys as gentlemen and reasonable beings, of making them respect themselves by the mere respect he showed to them; of showing that he appealed and trusted to their own common sense and conscience. Lying, for example, to the masters, he made a great moral offence; placing implicit confidence in a boy's assertion, and then, if a falsehood was discovered, punishing it severely,—in the upper part of the school, when persisted in, with expulsion. Even with the lower forms he never seemed to be on the watch for boys; and in the higher forms any attempt at further proof of an assertion was immediately checked:" If you say so, that is quite enough-of course I believe your word;" and there grew up in consequence a general feeling that "it was a shame to tell Arnold a lie-he always believes one."

Perhaps the liveliest representation of this general spirit, as distinguished from its exemplification in particular parts of the discipline and instruction, would be formed by recalling his manner, as he appeared in the great school, where the boys used See Sermons, vol. iv. p. 99.

a

to meet when the whole school was assembled collectively, and not in its different forms or classes. Then, whether on his usual entrance every morning to prayers before the first lesson, or on the more special emergencies which might require his presence, he seemed to stand before them, not merely as the head master, but as the representative of the school. There he spoke to them as members together with himself of the same great institution, whose character and reputation they had to sustain as well as he. He would dwell on the satisfaction he had in being head of a society, where noble and honourable feelings were encouraged, or on the disgrace which he felt in hearing of acts of disorder or violence, such as in the humbler ranks of life would render them amenable to the laws of their country, or again, on the trust which he placed in their honour as gentlemen, and the baseness of any instance in which it was abused. "Is this a Christian school?" he indignantly asked at the end of one of those addresses, in which he had spoken of an extensive display of bad feeling amongst the boys, and then added, "I cannot remain here if all is to be carried on by constraint and force; if I am to be here as a gaoler, I will resign my office at once." And few scenes can be recorded more characteristic of him than on one of these occasions, when, in consequence of a disturbance, he had been obliged to send away several boys, and when, in the midst of the general spirit of discontent which this excited, he stood in his place before the assembled school, and said, "It is not necessary that this should be a school of three hundred, or one hundred, or of fifty boys; but it is necessary that it should be a school of Christian gentlemen."

The means of carrying out these principles were of course various; they may, however, for the sake of convenience, be viewed under the divisions of the general discipline of the school, the system of instruction, the chapel services, and his own personal intercourse and influence.

I. In considering his general management of the discipline of the school, it will only be possible to touch on its leading features.

1. He at once made a great alteration in the whole system of

punishments in the higher part of the school, "keeping it as much as possible in the background, and by kindness and encouragement attracting the good and noble feelings of those with whom he had to deal." As this appears more distinctly elsewhere, it is needless to enlarge upon it here; but a few words may be necessary to explain the view with which, for the younger part of the school, he made a point of maintaining, to a certain extent, the old discipline of public schools.

"The beau ideal of school discipline with regard to young boys would seem to be this, that, whilst corporal punishment was retained on principle as fitly answering to and marking the naturally inferior state of boyhood, and therefore as conveying no peculiar degradation to persons in such a state, we should cherish and encourage to the utmost all attempts made by the several boys, as individuals, to escape from the natural punishment of their age by rising above its naturally low tone of principle."

Flogging, therefore, for the younger part, he retained, but it was confined to moral offences, such as lying, drinking, and habitual idleness, while his aversion to inflicting it rendered it still less frequent in practice than it would have been according to the rule he had laid down for it. But in answer to the argument used in a liberal journal, that it was even for these offences and for this age degrading, he replied with characteristic emphasis

"I know well of what feeling this is the expression; it originates in that proud notion of personal independence which is neither reasonable nor Christian-but essentially barbarian. It visited Europe with all the curses of the age of chivalry, and is threatening us now with those of Jacobinism. . . . . . At an age when it is almost impossible to find a true manly sense of the degradation of guilt or faults, where is the wisdom of encouraging a fantastic sense of the degradation of personal correction? What can be more false, or more adverse to the simplicity, sobriety, and humbleness of mind, which are the best ornament of youth, and the best promise of a noble manhood?" b

2. But his object was of course far higher than to check par

a Serm. vol. iv. p. 106. The whole sermon is a full exposition of his view. Miscellaneous Works, p. 365.

ticular vices. "What I want to see in the school," he said, "and what I cannot find, is an abhorrence of evil: I always think of the Psalm, Neither doth he abhor anything that is evil. Amongst all the causes, which in his judgment contributed to the absence of this feeling, and to the moral childishness, which he considered the great curse of public schools, the chief seemed to him to lie in the spirit which was there encouraged of combination, of companionship, of excessive deference to the public opinion prevalent in the school. Pecuharly repugnant as this spirit was at once to his own reverence for lawful authority, and to his dislike of servile submission to unlawful authority; fatal as he deemed it to all approach to sympathy between himself and his scholars-to all free and manly feeling in individual boys-to all real and permanent improvement of the institution itself-it gave him more pain when brought prominently before him, than any other evil in the school. At the very sight of a knot of vicious or careless boys gathered together round the great school-house fire, "It makes me think,” he would say, “that I see the Devil in the midst of them." From first to last it was the great subject to which all his anxiety converged. No half year ever passed without his preaching upon it—he turned it over and over in every possible point of view-he dwelt on it as the one masterfault of all. If the spirit of Elijah were to stand in the midst of us, and we were to ask him, 'What shall we do then?' his answer would be, Fear not, nor heed one another's voices, but fear and heed the voice of God only." (MS. Serm. on Luke iii. 10. 1888.)

Against this evil he felt that no efforts of good individual example, or of personal sympathy with individual masters, could act effectually, unless there were something to counteract it constantly amongst the boys themselves.

"He, therefore, who wishes" (to use his own words) "really to improve public education would do well to direct his attention to this point, and to consider how there can be infused into a society of boys such elements as, without being too dissimilar to coalesce thoroughly with the rest, shall yet be so superior as to raise the character of the whole. It would be absurd to say that any school has