ook
rather high for the man whom I fix upon, and it is my great object
to get here a society of intelligent, gentlemanly and active men,
who may permanently keep up the character of the school, and if I
were to break my neck tomorrow, carry it on.

Ideas are in the air, and great inventions are worked out in different
parts of the world at the same time. Rousseau had written his "Emile,"
but we are not aware that Arnold ever read it.

And if he had, he probably would have been shocked, not inspired, by its
almost brutal frankness. The French might read it--the English could
not.

Pestalozzi was working out his ideas in Switzerland, and Froebel, an
awkward farmer lad in Germany, was dreaming dreams that were to come
true. But Thomas Arnold caught up the threads of feeling in England and
expressed them in the fabric of his life.

His plans were scientific, but his reasons, unlike those of Pestalozzi,
will not always stand the test of close analysis. Arnold was true to the
Church, but he found it convenient to forget much for which the Church
stood. He went back to a source nearer the fountainhead. All reforms in
organized religion lie in returning to the primitive type. The religion
of Jesus was very simple; that of a modern church dignitary is very
complex. One can be understood; the other has to be explained and
expounded, and usually several languages are required.

Arnold would have his boys evolve into Christian gentlemen. And his
type of English gentleman he did not get out of books on theology--it
was his own composite idea. But having once evolved it, he cast around
to justify it by passages of Scripture. This was beautiful, too, but
from our standpoint it wasn't necessary.

From his it was.

A gentleman to him was a man who looked for the best in other people,
and not for their faults; who overlooked slights; who forgot the good he
had done; who was courteous, kind, cheerful, industrious and clean
inside and out; who was slow to wrath, fervent in spirit, serving the
Lord. And the "Lord" to Arnold was embodied in Church and State.

Arnold used to say that schoolteaching should not be based upon
religion, but it should be religion. And to him religion and conduct
were one.

That he reformed Rugby through the Sixth Form is a fact. He infused into
the big boys the thought that they must help the little ones; that for a
first offense a lad must never be punished; that he should have the