Of all the painful things connected with my employment, nothing is equal to the grief of seeing a boy come to school innocent and promising, and tracing the corruption of his character from the influence of the temptations around him, in the very place which ought to have strengthened and improved it.  But in most cases those who come with a character of positive good are benefited; it is the neutral and indecisive characters which are apt to be decided for evil by schools, as they would be, in fact, by any other temptation.

This very feeling led him to catch with eagerness at every means by which the trial might be shortened or alleviated.  He believed that the change from childhood to manhood might be hastened without prematurely exhausting the faculties of body and mind; and it was on this principle that he chiefly acted.  He desired the boys to cultivate true manliness as the only step to something higher.  He treated them as gentlemen, and appealed and trusted to their common sense and conscience.

Lying to the masters he made a grave offence.  He placed implicit confidence in a boy’s assertion, and then, if a falsehood were discovered, punished it severely.  In the higher forms any attempt at further proof of an assertion was immediately checked.  “If you say so, that is quite enough; of course, I believe your word”; and there grew up in consequence a general feeling that “it was a shame to tell Arnold a lie:  he always believed you.”  Few scenes can be recorded more characteristic of him than when, in consequence of a disturbance, he had been obliged to send away several boys, and when, in the midst of the general spirit of discontent which this excited, he stood in his place before the assembled school and said, “It is not necessary that this should be a school of three hundred, or one hundred, or of fifty boys; but it is necessary that it should be a school of Christian gentlemen.”

Arnold’s method of teaching was founded on the principle of awakening the intellect of every individual boy.  Hence it was his practice to teach by questioning.  As a general rule, he never gave information, except as a kind of reward for an answer, and often withheld it altogether, or checked himself in the very act of uttering it, from a sense that those whom he was addressing had not sufficient interest or sympathy to receive it.  His explanations were at short as possible—­enough to dispose of the difficulty and no more; and his questions were of a kind to call the attention of the boys to the real point of every subject and to disclose to them the exact boundaries of what they knew or did not know.  With regard to the younger boys, he said:  “It is a great mistake to think that they should understand all they learn; for God has ordered that in youth the memory should act vigorously, independent of the understanding—­whereas a man cannot usually recollect a thing unless he understands it.”