At Rugby he made it an essential part of the headmaster’s office to preach a sermon every Sunday in the school chapel.  “The veriest stranger,” he said, “who ever attends service in this chapel does well to feel something more than common interest in the sight of the congregation here assembled.  But if the sight so interests a mere stranger, what should it be to ourselves, both to you and to me?” More than either matter or manner of his preaching was the impression of himself.  Even the mere readers of his sermons will derive from them the history of his whole mind, and of his whole management of the school.  But to his hearers it was more than this.  It was the man himself, there more than in any other place, concentrating all his various faculties and feelings on one sole object, combating face to face the evil which, directly or indirectly, he was elsewhere perpetually struggling.

His personal interest in the boys was always strong.  “Do you see,” he on one occasion said to an assistant-master who had recently come, “those two boys walking together?  I never saw them together before; you should make an especial point of observing the company they keep; nothing so tells the changes in a boy’s character.”

IV.—­Influence of the Great Teacher

But the impression which Arnold produced upon the boys was derived not so much from any immediate intercourse or conversation with them as from the general influence of his whole character, displayed consistently whenever he appeared before them.  This influence, with its consequent effects, was gradually on the increase during the whole of his stay.  From the earliest period, indeed, the boys were conscious of something unlike what they had been taught to imagine of a schoolmaster, and by many a lasting regard was contracted for him.  In the higher forms, at least, it became the fashion, so to speak, to think and talk of him with pride and affection.  As regards the permanent effects of his whole system, it may be said that not so much among his own pupils, or in the scene of his actual labours, as in every public school throughout England is to be sought the chief and enduring monument of Arnold’s headmastership at Rugby.

Of Arnold’s general life at Rugby there is no need to say much; for although the school did not occupy his whole energies, it is almost solely by his school work that he is remembered.  He took a not unimportant part in the political and theological discussions of his time, and various literary enterprises also engaged his attention.  In theology he entertained very broad views.  One great principle he advocated with intense earnestness was that a Christian people and a Christian Church should be synonymous.  That use of the word “Church” which limits it to the clergy, or which implies in the clergy any particular sacredness, he entirely repudiated.