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, he preached almost every Sunday to the end of his life, i.e. for thirteen years. It is of course impossible in a lecture like this to give any adequate account of these sermons, once so famous and so potent for good. If we were to call witnesses, they would be the boys who heard them, and the readers who have loved them the boys as painted in Tom Brown, and the readers, some of whom have become in their turn preachers. Hastily but very carefully written, they are not so much writing as talk-grave, very grave talk, heart to heart, soul to soul; talk from a grown-up man to boys of various ages to whom he is affectionately drawn not only by his office but by "all that is within him," and "for whose everlasting good, as Christian men," he feels profoundly responsible to God. Such talk from a schoolmaster to schoolboys had not, to the best of my knowledge, been heard for centuries. For the last fifty years it has been heard, with more or less of likeness, and of course with very different degrees of power, in almost every boarding-school all over England. Many new schools have come into being; some absolutely new, like Wellington, Haileybury, Clifton, Fettes, the Leys, Cheltenham; others virtually re-founded, like Sherborne, Sedbergh, Marlborough, Uppingham. Week by week a succession of Head Masters, many of them once Rugby boys or Rugby Assistant Masters, have striven hard to hold up before schoolboys not only lessons of honour and manliness and good fellowship, but lessons directly Christian; faith in Christ, brotherhood in Christ, consecration to Christ, forgiveness for Christ's sake, prayer in Christ's Name, Missions at home and abroad in Christ's Name, reverence for the poor in Christ's Name, love of Christ's Church, of Christ's Sacraments, above all of Christ's Person. This is, surely, one "aspect of Christian work." Many grateful testimonies have been borne to the part played in it by one most faithful and true Pastor. One of these, almost too sacred to quote publicly, is in the well-known poem of his brilliant son, Rugby Chapel. It gives, surely, and only as poets can give, the very ideal of a Christian teacher. But thou would'st not alone Be saved, my father! alone Therefore to thee it was given O faithful shepherd! to come, There are those who have questioned both the depth and the extent of Arnold's influence. A few years ago a brilliant and not unkindly writer startled many of his readers with the following sentence: "Dr Arnold unquestionably made a deep impression on those boys who were brought into close communication with himself, but I cannot find that his influence over the school survived longer than that of any subsequent Head Master; while upon other schools, so far as I have been able to ascertain, he produced-I believe it is not too much to say---no effect whatever." I hope I am not quite unable to enjoy a daring paradox or a delicate stroke of irony, but I must confess that this last clause produces on me much the same effect as the famous discovery years ago that "Shakespeare is a vastly overrated man.” "No effect whatever on other schools!" We shall hear shortly the testimony of Moberly as to Winchester, Moberly, who differed so widely from Arnold as a churchman and a theologian. But what would be the witness of Prince Lee, who went from Rugby to Birmingham, after being from 1830 to 1838 an assistant of Arnold; of Cotton and Bradley, who both went from Rugby to re-found and reinspire Marlborough; of Charles Evans, Percival, and Wilson, who all went from Rugby to found Clifton; of Benson, who went from Birmingham and Rugby to found Wellington; of Arthur Butler, who went from Rugby to found Haileybury; of Bradby, Rugbeian of Rugbeians, and of James Robertson, who succeeded Butler there; of Jex-Blake, who went from Rugby to preside over Cheltenham, and then returned to his old school, bent on renewing and deepening its old Arnoldian traditions? No, paradox is paradox, and truth is truth. The prophecy of Provost Hawkins has been more than fulfilled. The young man who was selected by the Rugby Trustees at the end of 1827 has, under God, and by his quickening influence on minds very different both from his own and from one another, "changed the face of education all through the public schools of England." But here let us guard against an obvious error. It is not of course my object to claim for Arnold that he alone originated efforts for Christianizing life and work at schools; or that the lines on which he worked were the only true lines; or that but for him nothing would have been done. Let us pass for a few moments from Rugby to Winchester, not forgetting that Arnold himself was a loyal son of that oldest of all old foundations. Winchester has always had both her Cathedral and her school Chapel, long of course before the Reformation. Her traditions are not religious only but ecclesiastical. More than two hundred years ago, in the bad times of Charles II., we find the saintly Ken thus addressing his young imaginary schoolfellow: "O Philotheus, you cannot enough 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. And this, on Moberly, it is 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. Wordsworth's part, was, so to speak, original. 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 |