Doctor Thomas Arnold, the celebrated head master of Rugby was born
June 13th, 1795, at West Cowes, in the Isle of Wight, where his
father, William Arnold, was a Collector of Customs. After several
years at Winchester school, he went to Oxford where in 1815 he was
elected a fellow of Oriel College. His intellectual bent showed at
Oxford, on the one hand, in fondness for Aristotle and Thucydides,
and on the other in what one of his friends has described as "an
earnest, penetrating, and honest examination of Christianity." As a
result of this honesty and earnestness, he became and remains a
great force wherever English is spoken. Elected head master of Rugby
in December 1827, and remaining in charge of that school for nearly
fourteen years, he almost revolutionized and did much to civilize
the English system of public education. When he left Rugby, in
December 1841, it was to go to Oxford as professor of Modern
History, but his death, June 12th, 1842, left him remembered by the
English-speaking world as "Arnold of Rugby." He left five volumes of
sermons, an edition of 'Thucydides,' a 'History of Rome' in three
volumes, and other works, but his greatest celebrity has been given
him by the enthusiastic love which his manly Christian character
inspired in his pupils and acquaintances, furnishing as it did the
master motive of 'Tom Brown at Rugby,' a book which is likely to
hold the place it has taken next to 'Robinson Crusoe' among English
classics for the young.
The sermon here republished from the text given in 'Simons's Sermons
of Great Preachers,' is an illustration of the eloquence which
appeals to the mind of others, not through musical and beautiful
language so much as through deep thought and compact expression.