upon the world of the code of the Philistine. To define Arnold's point of view, we should have, I think, to consider what in our modern slang is called his environment. Any one who reads the life of his father will see how profound was the influence upon the son. 'Somewhere, surely, afar,' as he says in the lines in Rugby Chapel,
In the sounding labour-house vast
Of being, is practised that strength,
Zealous, beneficent, firm.
Some of the force, may one say, had passed into the younger man, though, he had lost something of the austere strength, and had gained much in delicacy, and certainly in a sense of humour curiously absent in the elder, as it is, I think, in most good men. Dr. Arnold shared the forebodings common at the period of the Reform Bill. The old dogged Conservatism of the George III. and Eldon type was doomed. But who was to profit by the victory? The Radicals, led by Bentham and James Mill? That meant confiscation and disestablishment in practice; and in theory, materialism or atheism. This was the 'liberalism' denounced and dreaded by Newman.[1] But then, to Dr. Arnold, the Oxford Movement
- ↑ Culture and Anarchy, p. 23.
