Pureness,” he said, “Charity and Chastity.  If any virtues could stand for the whole of Christianity, these might.  Let us have them from the mouth of Jesus Christ Himself.  ’He that loveth his life shall lose it; a new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another.’  There is charity.  ’Blest are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.’  There is purity.”  Charity was indeed the law of Arnold’s life.  He loved with a passionate and persistent love.  He loved his wife with increasing devotion as years went on, when she had become “my sweet Granny,” and they both felt that “we are too old for separations.”  He loved with equal fondness his mother (whom in his brightness, fun, and elasticity he closely resembled), the sisters who so keenly shared his intellectual tastes, his children living and departed.  “Dick[34] was a tower of strength.”  “Lucy[35] is such a perfect companion.”  “Nelly[36] is the dearest girl in the world.”  “That little darling[4] we have left behind us at Laleham; and he will soon fade out of people’s remembrance, but we shall remember him as long as we live, and he will be one more bond between us, even more perhaps in his death than in his sweet little life.”  “It was exactly a year since we had driven to Laleham with darling Tommy[38] and the other two boys to see Basil’s[37] grave; and now we went to see his grave, poor darling.”  “I cannot write Budge’s[39] name without stopping to look at it in stupefaction at his not being alive.”

Outside the circle of his family, his affection was widely bestowed and faithfully maintained.  He had the true genius of friendship, and when he signed himself “affectionately” it meant that he really loved.  Enmities he had none.  If ever he had suffered injuries they were forgiven, forgotten, and buried out of sight.  Even in the controversies where his strongest convictions were involved, he steadily abstained from bitterness, violence, and detraction.  “Fiery hatred and malice,” he said, with perfect truth, “are what I detest, and would always allay or avoid if I could.”

In the preface to his Last Essays on the Church and Religion, he takes those two great lessons of the Christian Gospel—­Charity and Chastity—­and goes on to show how they illustrate “the natural truth of Christianity,” as distinct from any considerations of Revelation or Law.  “Now, really,” he says, writing in 1877, “if there is a lesson which in our day has come to force itself upon everybody, in all quarters and by all channels, it is the lesson of the solidarity, as it is called by modern philosophers, of men.  If there was ever a notion tempting to common human nature, it was the notion that the rule of ‘every man for himself’ was the rule of happiness.  But at last it turns out as a matter of experience, and so plainly that it is coming to be even generally admitted—­it turns out that the only real happiness is in a kind of impersonal higher life, where the happiness of others counts with a man as essential to his own.  He that loves his life does really turn out to lose it, and the new commandment proves its own truth by experience.”