This was a perfectly just criticism on the nascent ritualism of thirty years ago.  Time and study have pruned this devotional exuberance, but he rightly described what he saw.  With such performances he had no sympathy; but he loved what he had been accustomed to—­the grave and reverend method of worship which was traditional in our cathedrals and college chapels.  He communicated by preference at an early service.  He revelled in the architecture of our great churches, and enjoyed, though he did not understand, their fine music.  And he added one or two little mannerisms of his own, which were clearly intended to mark his love of ecclesiastical proprieties.  Thus the present writer remembers that he used, with great solemnity and deliberation, to turn to the east at the Creed in Harrow School Chapel, where the clergy neglected to do so.  It was the traditional mode of the Church of England, and that was enough for him.  Again, we all know that he described the Athanasian Creed as “Learned science with a strong dash of temper”; yet I remember him saying, with an air of stately admiration, after Service on Ascension Day, “I always like to hear the Athanasian Creed sung.  BUT ONE GOD sounds so magnificently, with that full swell of the organ.  It seems to come with the whole authority of the Church.”

Then again the list of his favourite writers on religious subjects shows exactly the same taste and temper as was shown by his devotional practices—­St. Augustine, that “glorious father of the Catholic Church”; “the nameless author of the Imitatio”; Bishop Thomas Wilson, whose Maxims and Sacra he so constantly quoted; Isaac Barrow, whose sermons he used to read to his family on Sunday evenings; Cardinal Newman, to whom he had listened so delightedly in undergraduate days.[58]

To pass from an account of a man’s religious sentiment to that of his daily life would in too many cases be an abrupt and even a painful transition; but in the case of Arnold, it is the easiest and most natural in the world.  That which he professed he practised, and, as he taught, so he lived.  From first to last he was true to his own doctrine that we must cultivate our best self in every department of our being, and be content with nothing less than our predestined perfection.  In his character and life, “whatsoever things are lovely” were harmoniously blent.

Before all else he was a worshipper of nature, watching all her changing aspects with a lover-like assiduity, and never happy in a long-continued separation from her.  Then his manifold culture and fine taste enabled him to appreciate at its proper value all that is good in high civilization, and yet the unspoilt naturalness of his character found a zest in the most commonplace pleasures of daily existence.  Probably Art, whether in music or painting, affected him less than most men of equal cultivation; but there never lived a human being to whom Literature and Society—­books