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thank God for the order of the place you live in, where there is so much care taken to make you a good Christian as well as a good scholar; where you go frequently to prayers every day in the chapel and in the school, so that you are in a manner brought up in a perpetuity of prayer."

This was the tradition. How its light had gradually waned, I do not know; but in 1835, seven years after Arnold went to Rugby, there were at least two very earnest and very able men who strove hard to revive it, Bishop Moberly, the Head Master, and Bishop Charles Wordsworth, the Lower Master. They had been simultaneously appointed in 1835.

In Wordsworth's Annals of my Life there are some deeply interesting particulars as to how he went to work; how he strove to make prayer in the dormitories a regular practice, and how on one memorable evening, Easter Eve, 1838, he got a promise from the Prefects to enforce silence. And this, on Wordsworth's part, was, so to speak, original. Moberly, it is true, says, "I owe more to a few casual remarks of Arnold than to any advice or example of any other person"; but Wordsworth tells us explicitly that he "knew nothing of the great work which Arnold had been doing for ten years. He had never seen or even heard of his Sermons preached at Rugby."

The work of the two friends at Winchester was mainly on what may be called "High Church" lines. Wordsworth himself writes: "The truth is, there was (in those years) a general awakening, which in many instances, as with us at Winchester, partook decidedly of a Church character, such as Arnold's teaching and example, however excellent in their way, had little or no tendency to create." This, I may say, is fully borne out by his own work, Christian Boyhood at a Public School, which consists of over fifty discourses delivered between 1842 and 1846.

During most of the time that Charles Wordsworth was at Winchester, his brother Christopher, afterwards Bishop of Lincoln, was working in much the same spirit at Harrow. He was

appointed Head Master in 1836, in succession to Archbishop Longley. One of his first acts, and it was a brave "venture of faith" considering the small number of boys then in the school, was to build for the first time a School Chapel. This Chapel, together with his volume of School Sermons and his work entitled Theophilus Anglicanus, are the chief visible. memorials of his religious influence as a Schoolmaster. Himself a saintly man, of rare beauty of character, he came at an unpropitious time. He was known as a High Churchman, and in the years between the publication of Tract XC., 1841, and 1845, when Newman joined the Church of Rome, a High Churchman was a "suspect."

Dr Wordsworth left Harrow at the end of 1844, and was succeeded by Dr Vaughan, who, for just fifteen years at Harrow, and afterwards for forty-three years, as Vicar of Doncaster, Master of the Temple, and Dean of Llandaff, was destined to leave a deep-set mark on the spiritual life of his time. He was known, when he came to Harrow at the age of twenty-eight, as a brilliant Cambridge scholar, as the son of that "Vaughan of Leicester" who was for many years an enlightened leader in the Evangelical party, and above all as a favourite pupil of Arnold. The two Head Masters were singularly unlike each other, in look, in voice, in manner, in range of learning, in variety of interests, in theological bias. But there can be no doubt that Vaughan brought to the service of Harrow much of the Christian spirit of Arnold, besides those keenly tempered gifts which were peculiarly his own. He was far indeed from being a copyist of any man. He was even jealous of its being supposed that life at Harrow was in any way an imitation of life at Rugby. But writing at the close of his first year at Harrow, 1845, in the preface to his first volume of Sermons, he could not but own his debt to his great master so lately and so suddenly called away. "It will," he says, "be seen at once how much help I have derived, in the subjects of some, and the general tone of all, from those addressed by Dr Arnold

to a like congregation. I find more and more how widely he has occupied this ground."

I must not attempt to describe the "Christian work" which Dr Vaughan attempted and carried through during his fifteen years at Harrow. My judgment of it, even if true, would certainly not be impartial. He has laid me and hundreds of other pupils under such spiritual obligations as make impartiality a heartless phrase. But I can say, without reserve, that at no time in my life have I been so conscious of living in a directly Christian atmosphere, with Christian ideals of duty habitually set up for reverence, as during the happy years when he presided over Harrow. The main cause was no doubt his impressive personality; his remarkable combination of deep devoutness with wit, penetration, and delicate sympathy; his quiet tenacity of purpose, and an inborn almost humorous sense of masterfulness which no softness of manner could disguise. But doubtless the spell of this personality was confirmed week by week by his admirable sermons, so keen in their insight, so tender in their touch, so winning in their expression, so rich in the fulness of Christ.

It is easy to overrate, but it is quite as easy to underrate, the lasting power of sermons. All I can say is, and many still living would gratefully concur, that these sermons of our dear master, as summed up in his Memorials of Harrow Sundays, have been to hundreds of us the day-star of our lives.

No sketch, however slight, of Christian work at Public Schools can omit the thirty-four years of Edward Thring at Uppingham. Beyond all doubt he was a most original man. His ideas, his plans, his methods, his manner of speech, his whole bearing towards Trustees and Commissioners, boys and masters, were his own. Consciously, he borrowed nothing. He framed his schemes early in life, and pushed them forward with the energy of a Cæsar.

From first to last he was haunted by one fruitful thought: no boy at school was fairly dealt with unless his surroundings

were favourable to his health, physical, mental, and moral. The schoolrooms must be large, light, cheery, well furnished with good desks, seats, maps, and the like. The large room in which they met must be stately. The Chapel must be noble, awe-inspiring. In the long run, what he often humorously called the "almighty wall" must tell upon the feelings, the imaginations, the memories. By the "almighty wall" I understand him to have meant all that is structural and material. They are not the highest things in education; but unless they are high, the highest cannot be attained. Sordid surroundings, overcrowded boarding houses, black, forbidding, low, ill-lighted rooms, anything suggestive of the barracks or the workhouse-these are an insult to a liberal education.

He himself once explained very clearly to his Trustees, after they had had twenty-two years of him, without perhaps even then understanding him, what had been his aims since he first entered their service. "The two facts," he said, "on which the present school has been built up are very simple and easily stated. They are these two truths: Firstly, the necessity in a true school that every boy, be he clever or stupid, must have proper individual attention paid to him. If he has not, the boy who has not, so far as he is neglected, is not at school.

"Secondly, that proper machinery for work, proper tools, of all sorts, are at least as necessary in making a boy take a given shape, as in making a deal box. Out of these two axioms," he continues, "the present school of Uppingham has grown."

Had he desired to formulate the chief moral aim of his school, he might have said "true work "-no shams, no half and half, no shirking, but good, true work by every boy, because every boy can do something well, at all events he can do his best.

All that has been said so far might have been said of any original, clear-sighted, conscientious man. But Thring was

much more than this. He was also a humble, brave, fervid Christian. His faithful pupil and biographer, Mr Parkin, is certainly not going one whit beyond the truth when he says "that no one can gauge Edward Thring's work and character unless he understands the supreme influence on his life of the belief, nay, the passionate conviction, that education was in a special sense a work for God. The feeling indeed that in training young lives he was doing a special and direct work for God dominated his own life and all his views of school life. It gave him his starting point for practical work."

Yes, my friends, of the many holy men and women who, in this fast fleeting century, have done good "Christian work " for God, a high place must always be accorded-little as he would have cared for any praise but the love of his old pupils to the devotion, the faith, the patience, the trust, the dauntless self-consecration of Edward Thring.

Five years after the re-founding of Uppingham another. Founder appeared on the scene. In the spring of 1858 Edward White Benson was appointed the first master of Wellington College. Few men could be less like one another either in appearance or in character than Benson and Thring. Yet in reading what is written of the one Founder one is often reminded of the other; for each was essentially original, creative, constructive, autocratic, "fervent in spirit," rapid in temper and in action.

The following sentences by a shrewd friend of Benson have quite an Uppingham ring. "He at once impressed me with confidence and interest. The masters were made to feel from the first that they were helping to work out a new plan. Instinctively we saw that there were grand possibilities in the College as it grew under his hand....There was very little experience among the masters, but much enthusiasm. He taught us one great lesson-to be self-sacrificing for the College, to be ready to give, and to enjoy giving, time, money, thought, and whatever ability we possessed, to its developmen

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