'I
quite agree with you that it is most instructive to visit them.'
Dr. Arnold himself occasionally visited them, in Rugby; and the
condescension with which he shook hands with old men and women of
the working classes was long remembered in the neighbourhood. As
for the others, he regarded them with horror and alarm. 'The
disorders in our social state,' he wrote to the Chevalier Bunsen
in 1834, 'appear to me to continue unabated. You have heard, I
doubt not, of the Trades Unions; a fearful engine of mischief,
ready to riot or to assassinate; and I see no counteracting
power.'
On the whole, his view of the condition of England was a gloomy
one. He recommended a correspondent to read 'Isaiah iii, v, xxii;
Jeremiah v, xxii, xxx; Amos iv; and Habakkuk ii', adding, 'you
will be struck, I think, with the close resemblance of our own
state with that of the Jews before the second destruction of
Jerusalem'. When he was told that the gift of tongues had
descended on the Irvingites at Glasgow, he was not surprised. 'I
should take it,' he said, 'merely as a sign of the coming of the
day of the Lord.' And he was convinced that the day of the Lord
was coming--'the termination of one of the great aiones of the
human race'. Of that he had no doubt whatever; wherever he looked
he saw 'calamities, wars, tumults, pestilences, earthquakes,
etc.
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