life, have acquired a familiarity and encountered a conflict with some of the most harassing questions of morals and religion. It would also often happen, that the increasing reverence which they felt for him, would not only incline them to receive with implicit trust all that he said in the lessons or in the pulpit, but also to include in their admiration of the man, all that they could gather of his general views either from report or from his published works; whilst they would naturally look with distrust on the opposite notions in religion and politics brought before them, as would often be the case, in close connexion with vehement attacks on him, which in most cases they could hardly help regarding as unbounded or unfair. Still the greater part of his pupils, while at school, were, after the manner of English boys, altogether unaffected by his political opinions; and of those who most revered him, none in after life could be found who followed his views implicitly, even on the subjects on which they were most disposed to listen to him. But though no particular school of opinion grew up amongst them, the end of his teaching would be answered far more truly, (and it may suggest to those who know ancient history, similar results of similar methods in the hands of other eminent teachers,) if his scholars learned to form an independent judgment for themselves, and to carry out their opinions to their legitimate consequences,—to appreciate moral agreement amidst much intellectual difference, not only in each other or in him, but in the world at large;-and to adopt many, if not all of his principles, whilst differing widely in their application of them to existing persons and circumstances.

III. If there is any one place at Rugby more than another which was especially the scene of Dr. Arnold's labours, both as a teacher and as a master, it is the School-chapel. Even its outward forms from "the very cross at the top of the building," on which he loved to dwell as a visible symbol of the Christian end of their education, to the vaults which he caused to be opened underneath for those who died in the school, must always be associated with his name. "I envy Winchester its antiquity," he said, "and am therefore anxious to do all that can be done to give us something of a venerable outside, if we have not the nobleness of old associations to help us." The five painted windows in the chapel were put up in great part at his expense, altogether at his instigation. The subject of the first of these, the great east window, he delighted to regard as "strikingly appropriate to a place of education," being "the Wise Men's Offering," and the first time after its erection that the chapter describing the Adoration of the Magi was read in the church service, he took occasion to preach upon it one of his most remarkable sermons, that of "Christian Professions-Offering Christ our best." (Serm. vol. iii. p. 112.) And as this is connected with the energy and vigour of his life, so the subject of the last, which he chose himself a short time before his death, is

MS. Sermon.

the confession of St. Thomas, on which he dwelt with deep solemnity in his last hours, as in his life he had dwelt upon it as the great consolation of doubting but faithful hearts, and as the great attestation of what was to him the central truth of Christianity, our Lord's divinity. Lastly, the monuments of those who died in the school during his government, and whose graves were the first ever made in the chapel; above all, his own, the monument and grave of the only head-master of Rugby who is buried within its walls, gave a melancholy interest to the words with which he closed a sermon preached on the Founder's day, in 1833, whilst as yet the recently opened vaults had received no dead within them:

"This roof under which we are now assembled, will hold, it is probable, our children and our children's children; may they be enabled to think, as they shall kneel perhaps over the bones of some of us now here assembled, that they are praying where their fathers prayed; and let them not, if they mock in their day the means of grace here offered to them, encourage themselves with the thought that the place had long ago been profaned with equal guilt; that they are but infected with the spirit of our ungodliness."

But of him especially it need hardly be said, that his chief interest in that place lay in the three hundred boys who, Sunday after Sunday, were collected, morning and afternoon, within its walls. "The veriest stranger," he said, "who ever attends divine service in this chapel, does well to feel something more than common interest in the sight of the congregation here assembled. But if the sight so interests a mere stranger, what should it be to ourselves, both to you and to me?" (Serm. vol. v. p. 403.) So he spoke within a month of his death, and to him, certainly, the interest was increased rather than lessened by its familiarity. There was the fixed expression of countenance, the earnest attention with which, after the service was over, he sat in his place looking at the boys as they filed out one by one, in the orderly and silent arrangement which succeeded, in the latter part of his stay, to the public calling over of their names in the chapel. There was the complete image of his union of dignity and simplicity, of manliness and devotion, as he performed the chapel service, especially when at the communion table he would read or rather repeat almost by heart the Gospel or Epistle of the day, with the impressiveness of one who entered into it equally with his whole spirit and also with his whole understanding. There was the visible animation with which, by force of long association, he joined in the musical parts of the service, to which he was by nature wholly indifferent, as in the chanting of the Nicene Creed, which was adopted in accordance with his conviction that creeds in public worship (Serm. vol. iii. p. 310) ought to be used as triumphant hymns of thanksgiving; or still more in the Te Deum, which he loved so dearly, and when his whole countenance would be lit up at his favourite verse-" When Thou hadst overcome the sharp

Sermons, vol. iii. p. 211.

ness of death, Thou didst open the kingdom of heaven to all believers."

From his own interest in the service naturally flowed his anxiety to impart it to his scholars; urging them in his later sermons, or in his more private addresses, to join in the responses, at times with such effect, that at least from all the older part of the school the responses were very general. The very course of the ecclesiastical year would often be associated in their minds with their remembrance of the peculiar feeling with which they saw that he regarded the greater festivals, and of the almost invariable connexion of his sermons with the services of the day. The touching recollections of those amongst the living or the dead, whom he loved or honoured, which passed through his mind as he spoke of All Saints' Day, and whenever it was possible, of its accompanying feast, now no longer observed, All Souls' Day;-and the solemn thoughts of the advance of human life, and of the progress of the human race, and of the Church, which were awakened by the approach of Advent,-might have escaped a careless observer; but it must have been difficult for any one not to have been struck by the triumphant exultation of his whole manner on the recurrence of Easter Day. Lent was marked during his last three years, but the putting up of boxes in the chapel and the boardinghouses, to receive money for the poor, a practice adopted not so much with the view of relieving any actual want, as of affording the boys an opportunity for self-denial and almsgiving.'

He was anxious to secure the administration of the rite of confirmation, if possible, once every two years; when the boys were prepared by himself and the other masters in their different boarding-houses, who each brought up his own division of pupils on the day of the ceremony; the interest of which was further enhanced, during his earlier years, by the presence of the late Bishop Ryder, for whom he entertained a great respect, and latterly by

He feared, however, to introduce more religous services than he thought the boys would bear without a sense of tedium or formality, on which principle he dropped an existing practice of devoting all the lessons in Passion Week to the New Testament; and always hesitated to have a chapel service on such festivals as did not fall on Sundays, though in the last year of his life he made an exception with regard to Ascension Day.

The following extract from a sermon preached in consequence of the delay of confirmation, by Bishop Ryder's death, may serve to illustrate as well his general feeling on the subject, as his respect for the individual.

And while I say this, it is impossible not to remember to what cause this disappointment has been owing, namely to the long illness and death of the late excellent Bishop of this diocese. This is neither the place nor the congregation for a funeral eulogy on that excellent person; we knew him too little, and were too much removed out of the ordinary sphere of his ministry, to be able to bear the best witness to him. Yet many here, I think, will remember the manner in which he went through the rite of confirmation in this chapel three years ago; the earnestness and kindness of his manner, the manifest interest which he felt in the service in which he was ministering. And though, as I said, we were comparatively strangers to him, yet we had heard enough of him to receive, without one jarring feeling, the full impression of his words and manner; we knew that as these were solemn and touching, so they were consistent and sincere; they were not put on for the occasion, nor yet, which is a far more common

the presence of his intimate friend, Archbishop Whately. The Confirmation Hymn of Dr. Hinds, which was used on these occasions, became so endeared to his recollections, that, when travelling abroad late at night, he would have it repeated or sung to him. One of the earliest public addresses to the school was that made before the first confirmation, and published in the second volume of his Sermons; and he always had something of the kind (over and above the Bishop's charge) either before or after the regular Chapel service.

The Communion was celebrated four times a year. At first, some of the Sixth Form boys alone were in the habit of attending; but he took pains to invite to it boys in all parts of the school, who had any serious thoughts, so that the number, out of two hundred and ninety or three hundred boys, was occasionally a hundred, and never less than seventy. To individual boys he rarely spoke on the subject, from the fear of its becoming a matter of form or favour; but in his sermons he dwelt upon it much, and would afterwards speak with deep emotion of the pleasure and hope which a larger attendance than usual would give him. was impossible to hear these exhortations or to see him administer it, without being struck by the strong and manifold interest which it awakened in him; and at Rugby it was of course more than usually touching to him from its peculiar relation to the school. When he spoke of it in his sermons, it was evident that amongst all the feelings which it excited in himself, and which he wished to impart to others, none was so prominent as the sense that it was a communion not only with God, but with one another, and that the thoughts thus roused should act as a direct and especial counterpoise to that false communion and false companionship, which, as binding one another not to good but to evil, he believed to be the great source of mischief to the school at large. And when, especially to the very young boys, who sometimes partook of the Communion, he bent himself down with looks of fatherly tenderness, and glistening eyes and trembling voice, in the administration of the elements, it was felt, perhaps, more distinctly than at any other time, how great was the sympathy which he felt with the earliest advances to good in every individual boy. case, did they spring out of the occasion. It was not the mere natural and momentary feeling which might have arisen even in a careless mind, while engaged in a work so peculiarly striking; but it was truly the feeling not of the occasion, but of the man. He but showed himself to us as he was, and thus we might and may dwell with pleasure on the recollection long after the immediate effect was over; and may think truly that, when he told us how momentous were the interests involved in the promises and prayers of that service, he told us no more than he himself most earnestly believed; he urged us to no other faith, to no other course of living, than that which by God's grace he had long made his own. It is a great blessing to God's church when they who are called to the higher offices of the ministry in it, thus give to their ninistry the weight, not of their words only, but of their lives. Still we must remember that the care of our souls is our own.-that God's means of grace and warnings furnished us by the ministry of his church, are no way dependent upon the personal character of the minister; that confirmation, with all its opportunities, is still the same point in our lives, by whomsoever it may be administered."

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That part of the Chapel service, however, which, at least to the world at large, is most connected with him, as being the most frequent and most personal of his ministrations, was his preaching. Sermons had occasionally been preached by the Head-master of this and other public schools to their scholars before his coming to Rugby; but (in some cases from the peculiar constitution or arrangement of the school) it had never before been considered an essential part of the head-master's office. The first half-year he confined himself to delivering short addresses, of about five minutes' length, to the boys of his own house. But from the second half-year he began to preach frequently; and from the autumn of 1831, when he took the chaplaincy, which had then become vacant, he preached almost every Sunday of the school year to the end of his life. It may be allowable to dwell for a few moments on a practice which has since been followed, whenever it was practicable, in the other great public schools, and on sermons, which, as they were the first of their kind, will also be probably long looked upon as models of their kind, in English preaching. They were preached always in the afternoon, and lasted seldom more than twenty minutes, sometimes less; a new one almost every time. "A man could hardly," he said, "preach on the same subject, without writing a better sermon than he had written a few years before." However much they may have occupied his previous thoughts, they were written almost invariably between the morning and afternoon service; and though often under such stress of time that the ink of the last sentence was hardly dry when the chapel bell ceased to sound, they contain hardly a single erasure, and the manuscript volumes remain as accessible a treasure to their possessors as if they were printed.

When he first began to preach, he felt that his chief duty was to lay bare, in the plainest language that he could use, the sources of the evils of schools, and to contrast them with the purity of the moral law of Christianity. "The spirit of Elijah," he said, "must

Extract from a letter to the Trustees, applying for the situation :-" I had no knowledge nor so much as the slightest suspicion of the vacancy," he writes, "till I was informed of it last night. But the importance of the point is so great that I most respectfully crave the indulgence of the Trustees to the request I venture to submit to them, namely, that if they see no objection to it I may myself be appointed to the chaplaincy, waiving, of course, altogether the salary attached to the office. Whoever is chaplain, I must ever feel myself, as Head-master, the real and proper religious instructor of the boys. No one else can feel the same interest in them, and no one else (I am not speaking of myself personally, but merely by virtue of my situation) can speak to them with so much influence. In fact, it seems to me the natural and fitting thing, and the great advantage of having a separate chapel for the school-that the master of the boys should be officially as well as really their pastor, and that he should not devolve on another, however well qualified, one of his own most peculiar and solemn duties. This, however, is a general question, which I only venture so far to enter upon, in explaining my motives in urging and requesting, in this present instance, that the Trustees would present me to the Bishop to be licensed, allowing me altogether to decline the salary, because I consider that I am paid for my services already; and that being Head-master and clergyman, I am bound to be the religious instructor of my pupils by virtue of my situation."