Part 17

'though the action was then raging, merely struck him with the flat part of his sword, as the fit chastisement for boyish impertinence. But the boy had been taught to consider his person sacred, and that a blow was a deadly insult; he therefore followed the officer, and having watched his opportunity, took deliberate aim at him with a pistol and murdered him.'

Such were the alarming results of insufficient whipping.

Dr. Arnold did not apply this doctrine to the Praepostors, but the boys in the lower parts of the school felt its benefits, with a double force. The Sixth Form was not only excused from chastisement; it was given the right to chastise. The younger children, scourged both by Dr Arnold and by the elder children, were given every opportunity of acquiring the simplicity, sobriety, and humbleness of mind, which are the best ornaments of youth.

In the actual sphere of teaching, Dr. Arnold's reforms were tentative and few. He introduced modern history, modern languages, and mathematics into the school curriculum; but the results were not encouraging. He devoted to the teaching of history one hour a week; yet, though he took care to inculcate in these lessons a wholesome hatred of moral evil, and to point out from time to time the indications of the providential government of the world, his pupils never seemed to make much progress in the subject. Could it have been that the time allotted to it was insufficient? Dr. Arnold had some suspicions that this might be the case. With modern languages there was the same difficulty. Here his hopes were certainly not excessive. 'I assume it,' he wrote, 'as the foundation of all my view of the case, that boys at a public school never will learn to speak or pronounce French well, under any circumstances.' It would be enough if they could 'learn it grammatically as a dead language. But even this they very seldom managed to do.

'I know too well, [he was obliged to confess,] that most of the boys would pass a very poor examination even in French grammar. But so it is with their mathematics; and so it will be with any branch of knowledge that is taught but seldom, and is felt to be quite subordinate to the boys' main study.'

The boys' main study remained the dead languages of Greece and Rome. That the classics should form the basis of all teaching was an axiom with Dr. Arnold. 'The study of language,' he said, 'seems to me as if it was given for the very purpose of forming the human mind in youth; and the Greek and Latin languages seem the very instruments by which this is to be effected.' Certainly, there was something providential about it--from the point of view of the teacher as well as of the taught. If Greek and Latin had not been 'given' in that convenient manner, Dr. Arnold, who had spent his life in acquiring those languages, might have discovered that he had acquired them in vain. As it was, he could set the noses of his pupils to the grindstone of syntax and prosody with a clear conscience. Latin verses and Greek prepositions divided between them the labours of the week.

As time went on he became, he declared, 'increasingly convinced that it is not knowledge, but the means of gaining knowledge which I have to teach'. The reading of the school was devoted almost entirely to selected passages from the prose writers of antiquity. 'Boys,' he remarked, 'do not like poetry.' Perhaps his own poetical taste was a little dubious; at any rate, it is certain that he considered the Greek Tragedians greatly overrated, and that he ranked Propertius as 'an indifferent poet'. As for Aristophanes, owing to his strong moral disapprobation, he could not bring himself to read him until he was forty, when, it is true, he was much struck by the 'Clouds'. But Juvenal, the Doctor could never bring himself to read at all.

Physical science was not taught at Rugby. Since, in Dr. Arnold's opinion, it was too great a subject to be studied en parergo, obviously only two alternatives were possible: it must either take the chief place in the school curriculum, or it must be left out altogether. Before such a choice, Dr. Arnold did not hesitate for a moment.

'Rather than have physical science the principal thing in my son's mind,' he exclaimed in a letter to a friend, I would gladly have him think that the sun went around the earth, and that the stars were so many spangles set in the bright blue firmament. Surely the one thing needful for a Christian and an English man to study is Christian, moral, and political philosophy.'

A Christian and an Englishman! After all, it was not in the classroom, nor in the boarding-house, that the essential elements of instruction could be imparted which should qualify the youthful neophyte to deserve those names. The final, the fundamental lesson could only be taught in the school chapel; in the school chapel the centre of Dr. Arnold's system of education was inevitably fixed. There, too, the Doctor himself appeared in the plenitude of his dignity and his enthusiasm. There, with the morning sun shining on the freshly scrubbed faces of his 300 pupils, or, in the dusk of evening, through a glimmer of candles, his stately form, rapt in devotion or vibrant with exhortation, would dominate the scene. Every phase of the Church service seemed to receive its supreme expression in his voice, his attitude, his look. During the Te Deum, his whole countenance would light up; and he read the Psalms with such conviction that boys would often declare, after hearing him, that they understood them now for the first time.

It was his opinion that the creeds in public worship ought to be used as triumphant hymns of thanksgiving, and, in accordance with this view, although unfortunately he possessed no natural gift for music, he regularly joined in the chanting of the Nicene Creed with a visible animation and a peculiar fervour, which it was impossible to forget. The Communion service he regarded as a direct and special counterpoise to that false communion and false companionship, which, as he often observed, was a great source of mischief in the school; and he bent himself down with glistening eyes, and trembling voice, and looks of paternal solicitude, in the administration of the elements. Nor was it only the different sections of the liturgy, but the very divisions of the ecclesiastical year that reflected themselves in his demeanour; the most careless observer, we are told, 'could not fail to be struck by the triumphant exultation of his whole manner on Easter Sunday'; though it needed a more familiar eye to discern the subtleties in his bearing which were produced by the approach or Advent, and the solemn thoughts which it awakened of the advance of human life, the progress of the human race, and the condition of the Church of England.

At the end of the evening service, the culminating moment of the week had come: the Doctor delivered his sermon. It was not until then, as all who had known him agreed, it was not until one had heard and seen him in the pulpit, that one could fully realise what it was to be face to face with Dr. Arnold. The whole character of the man--so we are assured--stood at last revealed. His congregation sat in fixed attention (with the exception of the younger boys, whose thoughts occasionally wandered), while he propounded the general principles both of his own conduct and that of the Almighty, or indicated the bearing of the incidents of Jewish history in the sixth century B.C. upon the conduct of English schoolboys in 1830. Then, more than ever, his deep consciousness of the invisible world became evident; then, more than ever, he seemed to be battling with the wicked one. For his sermons ran on the eternal themes of the darkness of evil, the craft of the tempter, the punishment of obliquity, and he justified the persistence with which he dwelt upon these painful subjects by an appeal to a general principle: 'The spirit of Elijah,' he said, 'must ever precede the spirit of Christ.'

The impression produced upon the boys was remarkable. It was noticed that even the most careless would sometimes, during the course of the week, refer almost involuntarily to the sermon of the past Sunday, as a condemnation of what they were doing. Others were heard to wonder how it was that the Doctor's preaching, to which they had attended at the time so assiduously, seemed, after all, to have such a small effect upon what they did. An old gentleman, recalling those vanished hours, tried to recapture in words his state of mind as he sat in the darkened chapel, while Dr. Arnold's sermons, with their high-toned exhortations, their grave and sombre messages of incalculable import, clothed, like Dr. Arnold's body in its gown and bands, in the traditional stiffness of a formal phraseology, reverberated through his adolescent ears. 'I used,' he said, 'to listen to those sermons from first to last with a kind of awe.'

His success was not limited to his pupils and immediate auditors. The sermons were collected into five large volumes; they were the first of their kind; and they were received with admiration by a wide circle of pious readers. Queen Victoria herself possessed a copy in which several passages were marked in pencil, by the Royal hand.

Dr. Arnold's energies were by no means exhausted by his duties at Rugby. He became known not merely as a headmaster, but as a public man. He held decided opinions upon a large number of topics; and he enunciated them--based as they were almost invariably upon general principles--in pamphlets, in prefaces, and in magazine articles, with an impressive self-confidence. He was, as he constantly declared, a Liberal. In his opinion, by the very constitution of human nature, the principles of progress and reform had been those of wisdom and justice in every age of the world--except one: that which had preceded the fall of man from Paradise. Had he lived then, Dr. Arnold would have been a Conservative. As it was, his Liberalism was tempered by an 'abhorrence of the spirit of 1789, of the American War, of the French Economistes, and of the English Whigs of the latter part of the seventeenth century'; and he always entertained a profound respect for the hereditary peerage. It might almost be said, in fact, that he was an orthodox Liberal. He believed in toleration too, within limits; that is to say, in the toleration of those with whom he agreed. 'I would give James Mill as much opportunity for advocating his opinion,' he said, 'as is consistent with a voyage to Botany Bay.'

He had become convinced of the duty of sympathising with the lower orders ever since he had made a serious study of the Epistle of St. James; but he perceived clearly that the lower orders fell into two classes, and that it was necessary to distinguish between them. There were the 'good poor'--and there were the others. 'I am glad that you have made acquaintance with some of the good poor,' he wrote to a Cambridge undergraduate. 'I quite agree with you that it is most instructive to visit them.' Dr. Arnold himself occasionally visited them, in Rugby; and the condescension with which he shook hands with old men and women of the working classes was long remembered in the neighbourhood. As for the others, he regarded them with horror and alarm. 'The disorders in our social state,' he wrote to the Chevalier Bunsen in 1834, 'appear to me to continue unabated. You have heard, I doubt not, of the Trades Unions; a fearful engine of mischief, ready to not or to assassinate; and I see no counteracting power.'

On the whole, his view of the condition of England was a gloomy one. He recommended a correspondent to read

'Isaiah iii, v, xxii; Jeremiah v, xxii, xxx; Amos iv; and Habakkuk ii', adding, 'you will be struck, I think, with the close resemblance of our own state with that of the Jews before the second destruction of Jerusalem'.

When he was told that the gift of tongues had descended on the Irvingites at Glasgow, he was not surprised. 'I should take it,' he said, 'merely as a sign of the coming of the day of the Lord.' And he was convinced that the day of the Lord was coming--'the termination of one of the great [Greek: aiones] of the human race'. Of that he had no doubt whatever; wherever he looked he saw 'calamities, wars, tumults, pestilences, earthquakes, etc., all marking the time of one of God's peculiar seasons of visitation'. His only uncertainty was whether this termination of an [Greek: aion] would turn out to be the absolutely final one; but that he believed 'no created being knows or can know'. In any case, he had 'not the slightest expectation of what is commonly meant by the Millennium'. And his only consolation was that he preferred the present Ministry, inefficient as it was, to the Tories.

He had planned a great work on Church and State, in which he intended to lay bare the causes and to point out the remedies of the evils which afflicted society. Its theme was to be, not the alliance or union, but the absolute identity of the Church and the State; and he felt sure that if only this fundamental truth were fully realised by the public, a general reformation would follow. Unfortunately, however, as time went on, the public seemed to realise it less and less. In spite of his protests, not only were Jews admitted to Parliament, but a Jew was actually appointed a governor of Christ's Hospital; and Scripture was not made an obligatory subject at the London University.

There was one point in his theory which was not quite plain to Dr. Arnold. If Church and State were absolutely identical, it became important to decide precisely which classes of persons were to be excluded, owing to their beliefs, from the community. Jews, for instance, were decidedly outside the pale; while Dissenters--so Dr. Arnold argued--were as decidedly within it. But what was the position of the Unitarians? Were they, or were they not, members of the Church of Christ? This was one of those puzzling questions which deepened the frown upon the Doctor's forehead and intensified the pursing of his lips. He thought long and earnestly upon the subject; he wrote elaborate letters on it to various correspondents; but his conclusions remained indefinite. 'My great objection to Unitarianism,' he wrote, 'in its present form in England, is that it makes Christ virtually dead.' Yet he expressed 'a fervent hope that if we could get rid of the Athanasian Creed many good Unitarians would join their fellow Christians in bowing the knee to Him who is Lord both of the dead and the living'. Amid these perplexities, it was disquieting to learn that 'Unitarianism is becoming very prevalent in Boston'. He inquired anxiously as to its 'complexion' there; but received no very illuminating answer. The whole matter continued to be wrapped in a painful obscurity, There were, he believed, Unitarians and Unitarians; and he could say no more.

In the meantime, pending the completion of his great work, he occupied himself with putting forward various suggestions of a practical kind. He advocated the restoration of the Order of Deacons, which, he observed, had long been 'quoad the reality, dead; for he believed that 'some plan of this sort might be the small end of the wedge, by which Antichrist might hereafter be burst asunder like the Dragon of Bel's temple'. But the Order of Deacons was never restored, and Dr. Arnold turned his attention elsewhere, urging in a weighty pamphlet the desirabitity of authorising military officers, in congregations where it was impossible to procure the presence of clergy, to administer the Eucharist, as well as Baptism. It was with the object of laying such views as these before the public--'to tell them plainly', as he said, 'the evils that exist, and lead them, if I can, to their causes and remedies'--that he started, in 1831, a weekly newspaper, "The Englishman's Register". The paper was not a success, in spite of the fact that it set out to improve its readers morally and, that it preserved, in every article, an avowedly Christian tone. After a few weeks, and after he had spent upon it more than L200, it came to an end.

Altogether, the prospect was decidedly discouraging. After all his efforts, the absolute identity of Church and State remained as unrecognised as ever.

'So deep', he was at last obliged to confess, 'is the distinction between the Church and the State seated in our laws, our language, and our very notions, that nothing less than a miraculous interposition of God's Providence seems capable of eradicating it.'

Dr. Arnold waited in vain.

But, he did not wait in idleness. He attacked the same question from another side: he explored the writings of the Christian Fathers, and began to compose a commentary on the New Testament. In his view, the Scriptures were as fit a subject as any other book for free inquiry and the exercise of the individual judgment, and it was in this spirit that he set about the interpretation of them. He was not afraid of facing apparent difficulties, of admitting inconsistencies, or even errors, in the sacred text. Thus he observed that 'in Chronicles xi, 20 and xiii, 2, there is a decided difference in the parentage of Abijah's mother;'--'which', he added, 'is curious on any supposition'. And at one time he had serious doubts as to the authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews. But he was able, on various problematical points, to suggest interesting solutions.

At first, for instance, he could not but be startled by the cessation of miracles in the early Church; but upon consideration, he came to the conclusion that this phenomenon might be 'truly accounted for by the supposition that none but the Apostles ever conferred miraculous powers, and that therefore they ceased of course, after one generation'. Nor did he fail to base his exegesis, whenever possible, upon an appeal to general principles. One of his admirers points out how Dr. Arnold

'vindicated God's command to Abraham to sacrifice his son and to the Jews to exterminate the nations of Canaan', by explaining the principles on which these commands were given, and their reference to the moral state of those to whom they were addressed--thereby educing light out of darkness, unravelling the thread of God's religious education of the human race, and holding up God's marvellous counsels to the devout wonder and meditation of the thoughtful believer'.