But him, on whom, in the prime Of life, with vigour undimm’d, With unspent mind, and a soul Unworn, undebased, undecay’d, Mournfully grating, the gates Of the city of death have for ever closed—­ Him, I count him well-starr’d.

In teaching the high lesson of Character and Conduct, he dealt sparingly in words, even words of “studied moderation.”  He taught principally, he taught conspicuously, he taught all his life long, by Example.  In regarding that example, as it stands clear across the interspace of fifteen years, we are reminded of Tertullian’s doctrine concerning the anima naturaliter Christiana.  A more genuinely amiable man never lived.  His sunny temper, his quick sympathy, his inexhaustible fun, were natural gifts.  But something more than nature must have gone to make his constant unselfishness, his manly endurance of adverse fate, his noble cheerfulness under discouraging circumstances, his buoyancy in breasting difficulties, his unremitting solicitude for the welfare and enjoyment of those who stood nearest to his heart.  The secret of his life was that he had taken pains with his own character.  While he was still quite young we find him bewailing the “worldly element which enters so largely into his composition,” and which threatens to make a gulf between him and the strict, almost Puritanical, associations of his youth.  “But,” he says in writing to his sister, “as Thomas a Kempis recommended, frequentur tibi violentiam fac ... so I intend not to give myself the rein in following my natural tendency, but to make war against it till it ceases to isolate me from you, and leaves me with the power to discern and adopt the good which you have and I have not.”

The result of this self-discipline and self-culture was to produce in him all the virtues which are supposed to be specifically and peculiarly Christian.  “Christianity,” said Bishop Creighton, “impressed the Roman world by its power of producing men who were strong in self-control, and this must always be its contribution to the world.”  Arnold’s self-control was absolute and unshakable; and to self-control he added the characteristically Christian virtues of surrender, placability, readiness to forgive injuries, perfect freedom from envy, hatred, and malice.  He revered the “method and secret of Jesus”; he did all honour to His “mildness and sweet reasonableness.”  “Christianity,” he said, “is Hebraism aiming at self-conquest and rescue from the thrall of vile affections, not by obedience to the letter of a law, but by conformity to the image of a self-sacrificing example.  To a world stricken with moral enervation Christianity offered its spectacle of an inspired self-sacrifice; to men who refuse themselves nothing it showed one who refused himself everything.”  Following this example, Arnold preached “Grace and peace by the annulment of our ordinary self,” and what he preached he practised.  “Kindness and