Before such a choice, Dr. Arnold did not hesitate
for a moment. 'Rather than have physical science the principal
thing in my son's mind,' he exclaimed in a letter to a friend, I
would gladly have him think that the sun went around the earth,
and that the stars were so many spangles set in the bright blue
firmament. Surely the one thing needful for a Christian and an
English man to study is Christian, moral, and political
philosophy.'
A Christian and an Englishman! After all, it was not in the
classroom, nor in the boarding-house, that the essential elements
of instruction could be imparted which should qualify the
youthful neophyte to deserve those names. The final, the
fundamental lesson could only be taught in the school chapel; in
the school chapel the centre of Dr. Arnold's system of education
was inevitably fixed. There, too, the Doctor himself appeared in
the plenitude of his dignity and his enthusiasm. There, with the
morning sun shining on the freshly scrubbed faces of his 300
pupils, or, in the dusk of evening, through a glimmer of candles,
his stately form, rapt in devotion or vibrant with exhortation,
would dominate the scene. Every phase of the Church service
seemed to receive its supreme expression in his voice, his
attitude, his look. During the Te Deum, his whole countenance
would light up; and he read the Psalms with such conviction that
boys would often declare, after hearing him, that they understood
them now for the first time.
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