'He made us think', a pupil wrote, 'of the politics of Israel, ...

'He made us think', a pupil wrote, 'of the politics of Israel, Greece and Rome.' In this sentence we come as near as we can hope to get to the secret of Arnold's power. He took the self-consciousness of the English gentry, benevolently authoritative, but uneasily aware that its authority was waning, and gave it religious and historic justification.' OF these three schools, united in their emphasis on personal conduct, the Protestant, on the whole, accepted the social philosophy of the age, the Anglican ignored it, the Arnoldian challenged it.

The Nonconformist business man, like Bright, severe with himself and others, within reason generous and within reason honest, is one of the central Victorian types. So, and of the same ancestry, is the preaching politician, like the Corn Law rhetorician, Fox.

On the whole, Eugene Arnold's Oakfield seems to me to convey most completely the effect that Arnold made on those who came under his influence. Another, of which Mr Gladstone may serve as the representative, is the new High Churchman, instructed in his faith but submissive to his teachers, touched by the art and poetry of old religion, inclining to regard the Church as the one immovable thing in a changing and shifting world, and therefore less concerned with its future than with its past, less with the application of his faith to the circumstances of the world than with its integrity as transmitted from the fathers.