to be unintelligible is not a special recommendation. Men may be
moderate for two reasons--through excess of feeling and because they are
actually dull.

Matthew Arnold has slipped back into his true position--that of a man of
letters. The genius is a man of affairs. Humanity is the theme, not
books. Books are usually written about the thoughts of men who wrote
books. Books die and disintegrate, but humanity is an endless
procession, and the souls that go marching on are those who fought for
freedom, not those who speculate on abstrusities.

The credential of Thomas Arnold to immortality is not that he was the
father of Matthew and eight other little Arnolds, but it lies in the
fact that he fought for a wider horizon in life through education. He
lifted his voice for liberty. He believed in the divinity of the child,
not in its depravity. Arnold of Rugby was a teacher of teachers, as
every great teacher is. The pedagogic world is now going back to his
philosophy, just as in statesmanship we are reverting to Thomas
Jefferson. These men who spoke classic truth, not transient--truth that
fits in spite of fashion, time and place--are the true prophets of
mankind. Such was Thomas Arnold!

* * * * *

If Thomas Arnold had been just a little bigger, the world probably would
never have heard of him, for an interdict would have been placed upon
his work. The miracle is that, as it was, the Church and the State did
not snuff him out.

He stood for sweet reasonableness, but unintentionally created much
opposition. His life was a warfare. Yet he managed to make himself
acceptable to a few; so for fourteen years this head master of a
preparatory school for boys lived his life and did his work. He sent out
his radiating gleams, and grew straight in the strength of his spirit,
and lived out his life in the light.

His sudden death sanctified and sealed his work before he was subdued
and ironed out by the conventions.

Happy Arnold! If he had lived, he might have met the fate of Arnold of
Brescia, who was also a great teacher. Arnold of Brescia was a pupil of
Abelard, and was condemned by the Church as a disturber of the peace for
speaking in eulogy of his master. Later, he attacked the profligacy of
the idle prelates, as did Luther, Savonarola and all the other great
church-reformers. When ordered into exile and silence, he still
protested his right to speak. He was strangled on order of the Pope,