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 favor;-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 endeavored 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, colored 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 against what he conceived to be the evil tendencies of the Oxford School. But he entertained also a growing sense of his isolation from all parties, whether from those with whom he had vainly tried to co-operate in former years, or those who, from fear of a common enemy, were now anxious to claim him as an ally; and it was not without something of a sympathetic feeling that, in his Lectures of this year, he dwelt so earnestly on the fate of his favorite Falkland, "who protests so strongly against the evil of his party, that he had rather die by their hands than in their company — but die he must; for there is no place left on earth where his sympathies can breathe freely; he is obliged to leave the country of his affections, and life elsewhere would be intolerable." And it is impossible not to observe how, in the course of sermons preached during this he turned from the active "course " of the year, Christian life, with its outward "helps and hindrances," to its inward "hopes and fears," and its final "close" or how, in his habitual views at this time, he seemed disposed, for the first time in his life, to regard the divisions of the Church as irreparable, the restoration of the Church as all but impracticable, and "to cling," as he expresses himself in one of his letters, "not from choice, but from necessity, to the Protestant tendency of laying the whole stress on Christian religion, and adjourning his idea of the Church sine die." It was in this spirit also, that he began to attach a new importance to the truths relating to a man's own individual convictions, which, though always occupying a prominent place in his thoughts, had naturally less hold upon his sympathies than those which affect man in relation to society.

*Sermons XIII. — XXXIV. in the posthumous volume, entitled "Christian Life; its Hopes, its Fears, and its Close."

VOL. II.

21

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The controversy on Justification acquired greater interest in his eyes than it had assumed before; and he felt himself called, for the first time, to unfold his own views on the subject. The more abstract and metaphysical grounds of truth, divine and human, which he had formerly been accustomed to regard in its purely practical aspect, were now becoming invested in his mind with a new value. The inseparable connection 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 byhim, 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 broke 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 priesthood, but even more by the Gentile spirit of government, stifling the sense of individual responsibility. "The treatment of the Lapsi, by Cyprian," he said, "is precisely in the spirit of the treatment of the Capuans by the Roman Senate, of which I was reading at the same time for my Roman History. I am myself so much inclined to the idea of a strong social bond, that I ought not to be suspected of any tendency to anarchy; yet I am beginning to think that the idea may be overstrained, and that this attempt to merge the soul and will of the individual man in the general body is, when fully developed, contrary to the very essence of Christianity. After all, it is the individual soul that must be saved, and it is that which is addressed in the Gospel. Do consider the immense strength of that single verse, 'Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind.' Indeed, so strong is the language of some parts of the New Testament in this direction, as to be an actual perplexity to me. St. Paul's language concerning it, I think, may be explained, but the refusal of our Lord to comply with some of the indifferent customs, such as washing before meals, is, when I come to consider it, so startling, that I feel that there is something in it which I do not fully understand."

*See Serm. vol. v. p. 316.

Such were the general feelings with which he entered on this year a year, on every account, of peculiar interest to himself and his scholars. It had opened with an unusual mortality in the school. One of his colleagues, and seven of his pupils, mostly from causes unconnected with each other, had been carried off within its first quarter; and the return of the boys had been delayed beyond the accustomed time in consequence of a fever lingering in Rugby, during which period he had a detachment of the higher Forms residing near or with him at Fox How. It was during his stay here that he received from Lord Melbourne the offer of the Regius Professorship of Modern History at Oxford, vacant by the death of Dr. Nares. How joyfully he caught at this unexpected realization of his fondest hopes for his latest years, and how bright a gleam it imparted to the sunset of his life, will best be expressed by his own letters and by the account of his Lectures.

CCLXXVIII. TO THE REV. DR. HAWKINS.

Fox How, August 21, 1841.

You may perhaps have heard my news already, but I must tell you myself, because you are so much connected with my pleasure in it. I have accepted the Regius Professorship of Modern History, chiefly to gratify my earnest longing to have some direct connection with Oxford; and I have thought with no small delight that I should now see something of you in the natural course of things every year, for my wife and myself hope to take lodgings for ten days or a fortnight every Lent Term, at the end of our Christmas holidays, for me to give my Lectures. I could not resist the temptation of accepting the office, though it will involve some additional work, and if I live to leave Rugby, the income, though not great, will be something to us when we are poor people at Fox How. But to get a regular situation in Oxford would have tempted me, I believe, had it been accompanied with no salary at all.