THE LAST ACT

“Thou seemest human and divine, The highest, holiest manhood, Thou!”

TENNYSON.

WE have reached the last stage, which is also the most critical one, of our inquiry. It is upon the accounts which we have of Christ’s Agony that the scornful denials of his manliness mainly rest. How, it is asked, can you Christians recognise as perfect man, as the head and representative of humanity, one who showed such signs of physical fear and weakness as Christ, by your own confession, showed in the garden of Gethsemane? Even without going to the roll of saints and martyrs, hundreds of men and women can be named who have looked a cruel death in the face without flinching, and endured tortures at least as painful as His with a constancy which was wanting in Him.

It was, indeed, a speech of this kind, in which the death of the Abolitionist leader, John Brown, was contrasted with that of Christ, as one so far superior in manliness that it ought to be enough of itself to shame Christians out of their superstition, which confirmed me in proposing this inquiry to you, as the most necessary and useful one we could engage in.

Now I freely admit that there is no recorded end of a life that I know of more entirely brave and manly than this one of Captain John Brown, of which we know every minutest detail, as it happened in the full glare of our modern life not twenty years ago. About that I think there would scarcely be disagreement anywhere. The very men who allowed him to lie in his bloody clothes till the day of his execution, and then hanged him, recognised this. “You are a game man, Captain Brown,” the southern sheriff said in the waggon. “Yes,” he answered, “I was so brought up. It was one of my mother’s lessons. From infancy I have not suffered from physical fear. I have suffered a thousand times more from bashfulness”; and then he kissed a negro child in its mother’s arms, and walked cheerfully on to the scaffold, thankful that he was “allowed to die for a cause, and not merely to pay the debt of nature, as all must.”

There is no simpler or nobler record in the Book of Martyrs, and in passing I would only remind you, that he at least was ready to acknowledge from whence came his strength. “Christ, the great Captain of liberty as well as of salvation,” he wrote just before his death, “saw fit to take from me the sword of steel after I had carried it for a time. But He has put another in my hand, the sword of the Spirit, and I pray God to make me a faithful soldier wherever He may send me.” And to a friend who left him with the words, “If you can be true to yourself to the end how glad we shall be,” he answered, “I cannot say, but I do not think I shall deny my Lord and Master, Jesus Christ.” The old Abolitionist would have been as amazed as any man at such a comparison as we are dealing with, and would have reminded us that, so far from treading the wine-press alone, he was upheld by the sympathy and enthusiasm of all of his own nation, and of the world outside his own nation, for whom he cared.

No such support had Christ. He knew too well that even the strongest of the little band which came with Him to the garden would deny Him before the light dawned over Olivet. And that sense of utter loneliness it was, more probably than all the rest of the burthen which He was carrying, that wrung from Him the prayer of agony, recalled almost before it was uttered, that the cup might pass from Him, and caused the sweat as it were great drops of blood to fall from His brow as He knelt and prayed.

How the tradition of that agony and bloody sweat has come to us is hard to say, as the nearest witnesses were asleep; but no Christian doubts that it is a true one, or that the passion of human weakness which then passed over His soul was a genuine shrinking from the unutterable anguish which was weighing it down to the dust.

But even admitting frankly all that is recorded of the agony and bloody sweat, such admission can only enhance the sublime courage of all that follows. It is his action when the danger comes, not when he is in solitary preparation for it, which marks the man of courage.

Let us just glance at this action. As Judas with his torchmen draws near He gathers Himself together, rouses His sleepy followers, and meets His enemy in the gate. There could have been no quailing in the glance before which the armed crowd of priests’ retainers went backward and fell to the ground.

Follow Him through that long night: to the Sanhedrim chamber, where He Himself furnishes the evidence which the chief priest sought for in vain while He was silent—to the court of the palace, where He bore the ribaldry and dastard tortures and insults of the low Jewish crowd till morning, turning in the midst of them with the reminding look to Peter, which sent His last friend, broken down by the consciousness of his own cowardice, weeping into the night—to the judgment-seat of Pilate, and the scourgings of the Roman soldiers—to Herod’s hall and the insults of the base Galilean court—back again to the judgment-seat of the representative of the divine Tiberius, and so to the final brutalities in the prætorium while the cross is preparing, and the blood which is dripping from the crown of thorns on His brow, mingles with that which flows from the wounds of His scourgings—and find, if you can, one momentary sign of terror or of weakness.

In all the world’s annals there is nothing which approaches, in the sublimity of its courage, that last conversation between the peasant prisoner, by this time a mass of filth and blood, and the Roman procurator, before Pilate led Him forth for the last time, and pleaded scornfully with His nation for the life of their King. The canon from which we started must guide us to the end. There must be no flaw or spot on Christ’s courage, any more than on His wisdom, and tenderness, and sympathy. And for the last time I repeat, the more unflinchingly we apply the test, the more clear and sure will the response come back to us.

We have been told recently, by more than one of those who profess to have weighed and measured Christianity and found it wanting, that religion must rest on reason, based on phenomena of this visible tangible world in which we are living.

Be it so. There is no need for a Christian to object. He can meet this challenge as well as any other. We need never be careful about choosing our own battle-field. Looking, then, at that world as we see it, labouring heavily along in our own time—as we hear of it through the records of the ages—I must repeat that there is no phenomenon in it comparable for a moment to this of Christ’s life and work. The more we canvass and sift and weigh and balance the materials, the more clearly and grandly does His figure rise before us, as the true Head of humanity, the perfect Ideal not only of wisdom and tenderness and love, but of courage also, because He was and is the simple Truth of God—the expression, at last, in flesh and blood, of what He who created us means each one of our race to be.

* * * * *

We have now finished our endeavour to look at the life of Christ from one point of view, and in special connection with one human quality. I trust it may prove to be only the first step for many of you in a study which will last your lives. At any rate it is one which the reverence which is felt by every member of this College for our founder ought to commend to us above all others.

He, as you all know, was never weary of impressing on us, term after term, year after year, that the aim of this place is to make good citizens, and that this can only be done by keeping vividly before ourselves, in all our work here, that common humanity which binds us all together by the ties of family, of neighbourhood, of country. What that common humanity means and implies, he taught us, can only be understood by reference to a Son of man, and Son of God, in whom we have all a common interest, through whom we have all a common spiritual relationship to His and our Father.

To bring this home to us all, as the central truth of our own lives, as the master-key of the confusions and perplexities in our own hearts, and in the world around us, was the crowning work of his life, and I trust we have been true to his principle and his method in our attempt to realise the life of this Son of Man, and Son of God, on this earth, which is so mysteriously at strife with the will of its Creator and Redeemer.

Into the heart of the mystery of that strife the wisest and best of us cannot penetrate, but the wayfaring man cannot help seeing that it is precisely around this life of the Son of Man, and Son of God, that the fiercest controversies of our time are raging. Is it not also becoming clearer every day that they will continue to rage more and more fiercely—that there can be no rest or peace possible for mankind—until all things are subdued to Him, and brought into harmony with His life?

It is to this work that all Churches and Sects, Catholic and Protestant, that all the leading nations of the world, known collectively as Christendom, are pledged: and the time for redeeming that pledge is running out rapidly, as the distress and perplexity, the threatening disruption and anarchy, of Christendom too clearly show. It is to this work too that you and I, every man and woman of us, are also called; and if we would go about it with any hope and courage, it can only be by keeping the life of Christ vividly before us day by day, and turning to it as to a fountain in the desert, as to the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.

From behind the shadow the still small voice—more awful than tempest or earthquake—more sure and persistent than day and night—is always sounding, full of hope and strength to the weariest of us all, “Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”

πορεύου καὶ σὺ ποίει ὁμοίως.

CONCLUSION[2]

AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT CLIFTON COLLEGE, SUNDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 1879.

“They crowd upon us in this shade, The youth who own the coming years— Be never God or land betrayed By any son our Harvard rears!”

THE REV. R. LOWELL.

WHAT is it in such societies as yours that gives them so strong a hold on, so unique an attraction for, those who have been for years engaged in the rough work of life? That the fact is so I think no one will deny, explain it how they will. I at least cannot remember to have met with any man who will not own that a visit to one of our great schools moves and touches him on a side of his nature which for the most part lies quiet, almost dormant, but which he feels it is good for him should be stirred. He may go back to his work without an effort to explain to himself why these unwonted sensations have visited him, but not without a consciousness that he has had a change of air which has done him good—that he has been in a bracing atmosphere, like that at the top of some high mountain pass, where the morning sun strikes earlier and more brightly than in the valleys where his daily task must be done.

To him who cares to pursue the inquiry, I think the conviction will come, that to a stranger there is something at once inspiring and pathetic in such societies as this, standing apart as they do from, and yet so intimately connected with, the great outside world.

Inspiring, because he finds himself once again amongst those before whom the golden gates of active life are about to open, for good or evil—each one of whom holds in his hands the keys of those gates, the keys of light or of darkness, amongst whom faith is strong, hope bright, and ideals, untainted as yet by the world’s slow stain, still count for a great power.

Pathetic, because he knows but too well how hard the path is to find, how steep to climb, on the further side of those golden gates—how often in the journey since he himself passed out from under them, his own faith and hope have burned dimly, and his ideal has faded away as he toiled on, or sat by the wayside, looking wistfully after it; till in the dust and jar, the heat and strain of the mighty highway, he has been again and again tempted to doubt whether it was indeed anything more than a phantom exhalation, which had taken shape in the glorious morning light, only to vanish when the work-day sun had risen fairly above the horizon, and dispersed the coloured mists.

He may well be pardoned if, at such times, the remembrance of the actual world in which he is living, and of the generation which moved into line on the great battle-field when he himself shouldered musket and knapsack, and passed into action out of the golden gates, should for a moment or two bring the pathetic side of the picture into strongest relief. “Where are they now who represented genius, valour, self-sacrifice, the invisible heavenly world, to these? Are they dead? Has the high ideal died out of them? Will it be better with the new generation?”[3]

Such thoughts, such doubts, will force themselves at times on us all, to be met as best we may. Happy the man who is able, not at all times and in all places, but on the whole, to hold them resolutely at arm’s length, and to follow straight on, though often wearily and painfully, in the tracks of the divine visitor who stood by his side in his youth, though sadly conscious of weary lengths of way, of gulfs and chasms, which since those days have come to stretch and yawn between him and his ideal—of the difference between the man God meant him to be—of the manhood he thought he saw so clearly in those early days—and the man he and the world have together managed to make of himself.

I say, happy is that man. I had almost said that no other than he is happy in any true or noble sense, even in this hard materialist nineteenth century, when the faith that the weak must to the wall, that the strong alone are to survive, prevails as it never did before—which on the surface seems specially to be organised for the destruction of ideals and the quenching of enthusiasms. I feel deeply the responsibility of making _any_ assertion on so moot a point to such an audience in such a place as this; nevertheless, even in our materialist age I must urge you all, as you would do good work in the world, to take your stand resolutely and once for all, at school and all your lives through, on the side of the idealists.

In doing so I trust and believe I shall not be running counter to the teaching you are accustomed to hear in this place. I know that I _should_ be running counter to it if anything I may say were to give the least encouragement to dreaminess or dawdling. Let me say then at once and emphatically, that nothing can be farther from my wish, or thought. The only idealism I plead for is not only compatible with sustained and vigorous work: it cannot be maintained without it.

The gospel of work is a true gospel, though not the only one, or the highest, and has been preached in our day by great teachers. And I do not deny that the advice I have just been giving you may seem at first sight to conflict with the work-gospel. Listen, for instance, to the ring of it in the rugged and incisive words of one of our strongest poets.

“That low man seeks a little thing to do, Sees it and does it. This high man, with a great thing to pursue, Dies ere he knows it. That low man goes on adding one to one, His hundreds soon hit. This high man aiming at a million, Misses an unit.”

This sounds like a deliberate attack on the idealist, a direct preference of low to high aims and standards, of the seen to the unseen. It is in reality only a wholesome warning against aiming at any ideal by wrong methods, though the use of the words “low” and “high” is no doubt likely to mislead. The true idealist has no quarrel with the lesson of these lines; indeed he would be glad to see them written on one of the door-posts of every great school, if only they were ballasted on the other by George Herbert’s quaint and deeper wisdom,

“Pitch thy behaviour low, thy projects high, So shalt thou humble and magnanimous be. Sink not in spirit: who aimeth at the sky, Shoots higher much than he that means a tree.”

Both sayings are true, and worth carrying in your minds as part of their permanent furniture, and you will find that they will live there very peaceably side by side.

There is in truth no real antagonism between them. The seeming paradox, like so many others, disappears in the working world. In the stress of the great battle of life it will trouble no soldier who keeps a single eye in his head, and a sound heart in his bosom. For he who has the clearest and intensest vision of what is at issue in that battle, and who quits himself in it most manfully, will be the first to acknowledge that for him there has been no approach to victory except by the faithful doing day by day of the work which lay at his own threshold.

On the other hand the universal experience of mankind—the dreary confession of those who have merely sought a “low thing,” and “gone on adding one to one,” making that the aim and object of their lives—unite in warning us that on these lines no true victory can be had, either for the man himself or for the cause he was sent into the world to maintain.

No, there is no victory possible for boy or man without humility and magnanimity; and no humility or magnanimity possible without an ideal. I have been pleading with you boys to take sides with the idealists at once and through life. I have told you unless you do so you can neither be truly humble nor truly magnanimous. You may reply, “Well, that advice may be good or bad, we cannot tell, until you tell us _how_ we are to side with them, and what you mean by an idealist.” Such a reply would be only reasonable, and I will try to answer the demand it makes, or at any rate to give you a few hints which will enable you to work out the question for yourselves.

There is not one amongst you all, I care not how young he may be, who has not heard or felt the call in his own heart, to put aside all evil habits, and to live a brave, simple, truthful life in this school. It may have come to you while listening in chapel or elsewhere to religious teaching, or in the play fields or dormitories; when you have been alone or in company, at work or at play; but that it has come, at some time, in some place, there is not a boy in this chapel who will deny. It is no modern, no Christian, experience this. The choice of Hercules, and numberless other Pagan stories, the witness of nearly all histories and all literatures, attest that it is an experience common to all our race. It is of it that the poet is thinking in those fine lines of Emerson which are written up in the Hall of Marlborough College:—

“So close is glory to our dust, So near is God to man, When duty whispers low, ‘Thou must,’ The youth replies, ‘I can.’”

It does not wait for the reasoning powers to be developed, but comes right in upon the boy himself, appealing to him to listen and follow.

It is this whisper, this call, which is the ground of what I have, for want of a better name, been speaking of as idealism. Just in so far as the boy listens to and welcomes it, he is becoming an idealist—one who is rising out of himself, and into direct contact and communion with spiritual influences, which, even when he shrinks from them, and tries to put them aside, he feels and knows to be as real (and will live I hope to acknowledge to be more real) than all influences coming to him from the outside world—one who is bent on bringing himself and the world into obedience to these spiritual influences. If he turns to meet the call and answers ever so feebly and hesitatingly, it becomes clearer and stronger. He will feel next, that just in so far as he is loyal to it he is becoming loyal to his brethren: that he must not only build his own life up in conformity with its teaching, must not only find or cut his own way straight to what is fair and true and noble, but must help on those who are around him and will come after him, and make the path easier and plainer for them also.

I have indicated in outline, in a few sentences, a process which takes a lifetime to work out. You all know too, alas! even those who have already listened most earnestly to the voice, and followed most faithfully, how many influences there are about you and within you which stand across the first steps in the path, and bar your progress; which are for ever dwarfing and distorting the ideal you are painfully struggling after, and appealing to the cowardice, and laziness, and impurity, which are in every one of us, to thwart obedience to the call. But here, as elsewhere, it is the first step which costs, and tells. He who has once taken that, consciously and resolutely, has gained a vantage ground for all his life. That first step, remember, ought to be taken by English boys at our English schools.

And here let me turn aside for a moment to note for you what seems to me, looking from outside, the ideal for which you English boys should just now be specially striving. The strength and weakness of the nation of which you are a part will always be reflected powerfully in these miniature Englands, and there is a national weakness which is alarming all thoughtful Englishmen at this time. Our race on both sides of the Atlantic has, for generations, got and spent money faster than any other, and this spendthrift habit has had a baleful effect on English life. It has made it more and more feverish and unsatisfying. The standard of expenditure has been increasing by leaps and bounds, and demoralising trade, society, every industry and every profession, until a false ideal has established itself, and the aim of life is too commonly to get, not to be, while men are valued more and more for what they have, not for what they are.

The reaction has, I trust, set in. A period of depression, such as has not been known for half a century, has come, happily in time to show us how unreal and transitory is all such material prosperity, that a nation’s life cannot stand any more than a man’s in the things which it possesses. But the reign of Mammon will be hard to put down, and all wholesome influences which can be brought to bear upon that evil stronghold will be sorely needed.

Amongst these none should be more potent than that of our great schools. It is probably too late for the present generation of grown men to restore a sounder tone, and set up a higher ideal. Those by whom it must be done, if it be done at all, are now growing up in such schools as this. There can be, I fear, no question that the outside world has been reflected in our schools. I hear on all sides stories of increased expenditure of all kinds. There must be fancy dresses for all games, and boys are made to feel uncomfortable who do not conform to the fashion, or who practise such useful and often necessary economies as wearing old clothes or travelling third-class. You know whether such things are true here. If they are, they are sapping true manliness, and tainting our national life at its roots. But the stain, I believe, has not sunk so deep, and the reaction may be swifter and deeper than elsewhere in societies bound together in so close an intimacy as must exist in such schools as this.

In no other portions of English society can public opinion be modified so swiftly and so radically as in a public school. One generation of brave boys may do it, and a school generation is only a short four or five years. I say then deliberately, that no man can gauge the value in English life, at this present critical time, of a steady stream of young men, flowing into all professions and all industries from our public schools, who have learnt resolutely to use those words so hard to speak in a society such as ours, “I can’t afford”; who have been trained to have few wants and to serve these themselves, so that they may have always something to spare, of power and of means, to help others; who are “careless of the comfits and cushions of life,” and content to leave them to the valets of all ranks. Many of us have hopes, from all we hear and know of this and other such schools, that such a stream of free and helpful young men may be looked for. Will you, boys, and above all you elder boys, who can give a tone to the standards and ideals of to-day here, which may last for many years, see that, so far at any rate as Clifton is concerned, such hopes shall not be disappointed?

And take my word for it, while you will be doing a great work for your country, and restoring an ideal which has all but faded out, you will be taking the surest road to all such success as becomes honest men to achieve, in whatever walk of life you may choose for yourselves. The outlook is by no means cheerful even for those who have learnt to live simply, and to estimate “comfits and cushions” at their true value, either in England or elsewhere. The following of false ideals has, I fear, thrown heavy odds for many years to come against the chances in our modern life of those who will not bow down to them.

It is more than thirty years since the wisest of American writers, and one of the best of American gentlemen, speaking to the young men of New England, made much the same sad confession as I am making to you to-day. “The young man,” he says, “on entering life finds the way to lucrative employment blocked by abuses. The ways of trade are grown selfish to the borders of theft, and supple to the borders (if not beyond the borders) of fraud. The employments of commerce are not intrinsically unfit for a man, or less genial to his faculties; but these are now in their general course so vitiated by derelictions and abuses, at which all connive, that it requires more vigour and resources than can be expected of every young man to right himself in them. Has he genius and virtue? the less does he find them fit for him to grow in, and if he would thrive in them he must sacrifice all the brilliant dreams of boyhood and youth; he must forget the prayers of his childhood, and must take on him the harness of routine and obsequiousness.... I do not charge the merchant or manufacturer. The sins of our trade belong to no class, to no individual. One plucks, one distributes, one eats. Everybody partakes, everybody confesses—with cap and knee volunteers his confession, yet none feels himself accountable. He did not create the abuse, he cannot alter it.... It happens, therefore, that all such ingenuous souls as feel in themselves the irrepressible strivings of a noble aim, who by the law of their nature must act simply, find these ways of trade unfit for them, and they come forth from it. Such cases are becoming more common every day. But by coming out of trade you have not cleared yourselves—the trail of the serpent reaches into all the lucrative professions and practices of men. Each has its own wrongs. Each finds a very intelligent conscience a disqualification for success.” And so further on he adds—“Considerations of this kind have turned the attention of many philanthropists and intelligent persons to the claims of manual labour as part of the education of every young man. If the accumulated wealth of the past generation is thus tainted—no matter how much of it is offered to us—we must begin to consider if it were not the nobler part to renounce it, and to put ourselves into primary relations with the soil and nature, and, abstaining from whatever is dishonest and unclean, to take each of us bravely his part with his own hands in the manual labour of the world.”

It is a sad confession that our modern society has come to such a pass, but one which I fear holds as true for England as for America. That it will continue so, no one who has faith in a righteous government of the world can believe. There seem to me signs on all sides that it is coming to an end, and that a new industrial world is already forming under the wreck of the old. But the time of change must be one of sore trial, and your generation will have to bear the strain of it. In such a time as this they only will be able to help their country in her need who have learnt in early life the great lessons of simplicity and self-denial, and I don’t hesitate to say, that the worst education which teaches simplicity and self-denial is better than the best which teaches all else but this.

The first aim then for your time and your generation should be, to foster, each in yourselves, and each in your school, a simple and self-denying life—your ideal to be a true and useful one must have these two characteristics before all others. Of course purity, courage, truthfulness are as absolutely necessary as ever, without them there can be no ideal at all. But as each age and each country has its own special needs and weaknesses, so the best mind of its youth should be bent on serving where the need is sorest, and bringing strength to the weak places. There will be always crowds ready to fall in with the dapper pliant ways which lead most readily to success in every community. Society has been said to be “always and everywhere in conspiracy against the true manhood of every one of its members”; and the saying, though bitter, contains a sad truth. So the faithful idealist will have to learn, without arrogance and with perfect good temper, to treat society as a child, and never to allow it to dictate. So treated, society will surely come round to those who have a high ideal before them, and therefore firm ground under their feet.

“Coy Hebe flies from those that woo, And shuns the hand would seize upon her; Live thou thy life, and she will sue, To pour for thee the cup of honour.”

Let me say a word or two more on this business of success. Is it not, after all, the test of true and faithful work? Must it not be the touchstone of the humble and magnanimous, as well as of the self-asserting and ambitious? Undoubtedly; but here again we have to note that what passes with society for success, and is so labelled by public opinion, may well be, as often as not actually is, a bad kind of failure.

Public opinion in our day has for instance been jubilant over the success of those who have started in life penniless, and have made large fortunes. Indeed this particular class of self-made men is the one which we have been of late invited to honour. Before doing so, however, we shall have to ask with some care, and bearing in mind Emerson’s warnings, by what methods the fortune has been made. The rapid accumulation of national wealth in England can scarcely be called a success by any one who studies the methods by which it has been made, and its effects on the national character. It may be otherwise with this or that millionaire, but each case must be judged on its own merits.

I remember hearing, years ago, of an old merchant who on his death-bed divided the results of long years of labour, some few hundreds in all, amongst his sons. “It is little enough, my boys,” were almost his last words, “but there isn’t a dirty shilling in the whole of it.” He had been a successful man too, though not in the “self-made” sense. For his ideal had been, not to make money, but to keep clean hands. And he had been faithful to it.

In reading the stories of these last persons whom the English nation is invited to honour, I am generally struck with the predominance of the personal element. The key-note seems generally some resolve taken in early youth connected with their own temporal advancement. This one will be Lord Mayor; this other Prime Minister; a third determines to own a fine estate near the place of his birth; a fourth to become head of the business in which he started as an errand-boy. They did indeed achieve their ends, were faithful to the idea they had set before themselves as boys; but I doubt if we can put them anywhere but in the lower school of idealists. For the predominant motive being self-assertion, their idealism seems never to have got past the personal stage, which at best is but a poor business as compared with the true thing. Try the case by a test every one of you can apply directly and easily. One boy here resolves—I will win this scholarship; I will be head of the school; I will be captain of the eleven; and does it. Another resolves—this school shall be purer in tone, simpler in habits, braver and stronger in temper, for my presence here; does his best, but doubts after all whether he has succeeded. I need not say that the latter is the best idealist; but which is the most successful Clifton boy?

I must bring these remarks to an end, and yet have only been able to touch, and that very lightly, the fringe of a great subject. I am sure many of you have felt this; and I shall be surprised if some amongst you are not already listening to me with a shade of jealousy in your minds, which might formulate itself somehow perhaps thus:—“Is this talk about idealism quite straightforward? Haven’t we heard all this before?—Self-denial, simplicity of life, courage, and the rest, are they not the first fruits of Christianity as we have been taught it? And we have been told, too, that this call of which you have been talking is the voice of Christ’s spirit speaking to ours. Can any good come of swaddling these truths in other clothes which will scarcely fit them better, or make them more easy, or more acceptable?”

To which I am glad to reply from my heart—Truly; so it is. _Rem acu tetigisti._ Christ is, indeed, the great idealist. “Be ye perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect,” is the ideal He sets before us—the only one which is permanent and all-sufficing. His own spirit communing with ours _is_ that call which comes to every human being. But my object has been to get you to-night to look at the facts of your own experience—and, as I have said already, the youngest has _some_ experience in these deep matters—without connecting them for the moment with any form of religion.

Supposing the whole Bible, every trace of Christendom, to disappear to-morrow, the same thing would, nevertheless, be occurring to you, and me, and every man. We should each of us still be conscious of a presence, which we are quite sure is not ourself, in the deepest recesses of our own heart, communing with us there and calling us to take up our twofold birthright as man—the mastery over visible things, and above all the mastery over our own bodies, actions, thoughts—and the power, always growing, of this mysterious communion with the invisible.

It is therefore that I have abstained from the use of religious phraseology, believing that, apart altogether from the Christian revelation, the idealist will and must always remain nearest to the invisible world, and therefore most powerful in this visible one.

I think this method is worth using now and then, because no doubt the popular verdict of this time is against idealism. If you have not already felt it, you will assuredly feel as soon as you leave these walls, that your lot is cast in a world which longs for nothing so much as to succeed in shaking off all belief in anything which cannot be tested by the senses, and gauged and measured by the intellect, as the trappings of a worn-out superstition.

Men have been trying, so runs the new gospel, to live by faith, and not by sight, ever since there is any record at all of their lives; and so they have had to manufacture for themselves the faiths they were to live by. What is called the life of the soul or spirit, and the life of the understanding, have been in conflict all this time, and the one has always been gaining on the other. Stronghold after stronghold has fallen, till it is clear almost to demonstration that there will soon be no place left for that which was once deemed all-powerful. The spiritual life can no longer be led honestly. Man has no knowledge of the invisible upon which he can build. Let him own the truth and turn to that upon which he _can_ build safely—the world of matter, his knowledge of which is always growing; and be content with the things he can see and taste and handle. Those who are telling you still in this time that your life can and ought to be lived in daily communion with the unseen—that so only you can loyally control the visible—are either wilfully deceiving you, or are dreamers and visionaries.

So the high priests of the new gospel teach, and their teaching echoes through our literature, and colours the life of the streets and markets in a thousand ways; and a Mammon-ridden generation longing to be rid of what they hope are only certain old and clumsy superstitions—which they _try_ to believe injurious to others, and are quite sure make them uneasy in their own efforts to eat, drink, and be merry—applauds as openly as it dare, and hopes soon to see the millennium of the flesh-pots publicly declared and recognised.

Against which, wherever you may encounter them, that you young Englishmen may be ready and able to stand fast, is the hope and prayer of many anxious hearts; in a time, charged on every side with signs of the passing away of old things, such as have not been seen above the horizon in Christendom since Luther nailed his protest on the church door of a German village.

Footnote 2:

Printed by request. T. H.

Footnote 3:

Emerson.

DELIVERED ON 8TH FEBRUARY 1891, IN THE COURSE OF LAYMEN’S SUNDAY EVENING ADDRESSES AT RUGBY.

JUST fifty years ago, in February 1841, I was a Rugby boy, sitting where you sit now. That half-year was my last at school. It was Dr. Arnold’s last year. He died in June 1842. I had been at the school for eight years, and had gone through it from the third to the sixth, in the School House. It had been a notable eight years in Rugby’s history. Stanley and Vaughan were sixth form boys in their last year when I was a new boy. I was Clough’s study fag. Matthew Arnold, the present Dean of Westminster, and Franklin Lushington were my contemporaries. Theodore Walrond was head of the school when I left, with Conington next, or next but one, to him. I need not name a score of others

“fortemque Gyan, fortemque Cleanthum”

who have done good work for England in Church and State, in India and the Colonies, in this eventful half-century. I only name those who occur to me as the typical Rugbeians of those years. You can fill up the list yourselves if you like from the school register. You will find it a noteworthy roll-call.

When I was a new boy, Christmas 1833, the tide of religious and political bigotry, which would surely have drowned a weaker man, was in full flood against our headmaster. He was forbidden to preach the sermon on the installation of Arthur Stanley’s father to the Bishopric of Norwich. Many of his oldest and dearest Oxford friends were openly alienated from him, and bitterly opposed to his teaching. Even those who remained staunch were seriously alarmed at many of the doings and sayings of this new type of headmaster.

When I left, the tide had turned. Even the (so-called) religious newspapers were silenced. He had been made Queen’s Chaplain, and, what he valued most, Professor of Modern History at his old university. In my undergraduate year I attended his inaugural lecture and his first course on Modern History, and witnessed the noble amends which Oxford then made to one whom she now recognised as amongst her noblest and most attached sons.

You may well believe then what a power Rugby has been in my life, and so far as I can judge, in the life of most of my schoolfellows. For, though there may be exceptions to the rule, it is undoubtedly true, that the years from ten till eighteen or nineteen are those in which the seed is sown and the bent given which determine the after-life of men. I passed all those years under the spell of this place and Arnold, and for half a century have never ceased to thank God for it.

My first duty then to-day is to confess this in the fullest and frankest words. So far I have felt my course clear, but no further. From circumstances to which I need not refer, my connection with Rugby has been less close than with other schools. When my own boys were old enough, I had to look round and choose the school which answered best to the Rugby of my day. Happily for me—happily too for England—my choice was ample. Three of my old schoolfellows were headmasters,—Vaughan of Harrow, Bradley of Marlborough (where Bishop Cotton, my old private tutor here, had preceded him), Bradby of Haileybury (in succession to Arthur Butler, another distinguished Rugbeian). So my eldest son went to Marlborough, and the younger ones to Haileybury, and I have thus seen more of these daughters, as I may call them, of the old Rugby, than of my own old school.

For attendance at Rugby dinners and flying visits on Speech days and other special occasions, however pleasant, are not enough to keep one in touch with the place—to know how far the old lines have been kept, the old traditions cherished—what are the new tendencies and temptations which have arisen as the years rolled by. And yet without such knowledge how could I hope to respond to any good purpose to the desire of your headmaster that I should deliver this address? A question which I own I found it difficult to answer to my own satisfaction; but in such cases one has no right to rely on one’s own judgment. Obedience to the man at the helm is the only true rule; and so in deference to his wish I am here to-night to do my best to justify his choice.

After thinking the matter over with some care, I resolved that I cannot do better than give you my view of what it was that the average boy carried away from our Rugby of half a century ago which stood him in the best stead—was of the highest value to him in after-life. By the average boy I mean, one who entered into the life and caught some of the spirit of the place, without distinguishing himself as a scholar, or coming under the direct personal teaching and influence of the man of genius who was our headmaster. Indirectly, no boy could help being more or less under that influence, for the air of the whole place was full of it.

I have been in some doubt as to what to put first, and am by no means sure that the few who are left of my old schoolfellows would agree with me; but, speaking for myself, I think this was our most marked characteristic, the feeling that in school and close we were in training for a big fight—were in fact already engaged in it—a fight which would last all our lives, and try all our powers, physical, intellectual, and moral, to the utmost. I need not say that this fight was the world-old one of good with evil, of light and truth against darkness and lies, of Christ against the devil.

Of course all education worthy of the name teaches this lesson indirectly, but to have it vividly and directly brought home to us, as it was here fifty years ago, was a boon beyond price. I have always thought that it was his recognition of this in the Rugby boys of that time which drew that well-known testimony from Dr. Moberly, then an Oxford tutor, afterwards headmaster of Winchester, and one of the greatest educators of our time,—“Arnold’s pupils,” he wrote, “brought up to Oxford a quite different character from what we knew elsewhere. They were thoughtful, manly-minded, conscious of duty and obligation when they first came up; and we looked on him as exercising an influence for good which (for how many years I know not) had been absolutely unknown to our public schools.” But this testimony I believe could never have been given had Arnold’s teaching stopped here. What gave, I think, the character Dr. Moberly recognised to Rugby boys, was, not the mere conviction that we were soldiers in a war, but that we were soldiers who were absolutely sure to win if only we were true to our Captain,—that He was actually present with every one of us, and would surely give the battle to our hands if we would loyally surrender our wills to Him. Let me express what I want to say in the noble words of Arnold’s most famous pupil. You all, I hope, know A. Stanley’s hymn for Ascension Day. One verse runs:

“He is gone, towards their goal World and Church must onward roll. Far behind we leave the past, Forwards are our glances cast. Still His words before us range Through the ages as they change; Wheresoe’er the Truth shall lead He will give whate’er we need.”

The youngest boy here, we were taught in no faltering speech, has an utterly trustworthy guide in his own heart and conscience, if he will only listen to Him and trust Him—if he will only follow the Truth and go forward boldly. “It is a lying spirit,” was one of Arnold’s most emphatic sayings, “that says, ‘Look backwards.’”

There was an inspiring ring in such teaching as this; and for my part, with half-a-century’s experience behind me, I hold it to-day to be simply and absolutely true, in spite of oft-repeated criticisms as to Arnold’s methods in teaching and ruling. It is written of the most self-willed of American Presidents:

“He couldn’t see but jest one side; Ef his ’twas God’s, and that was plenty: And so his ‘forrard’ multiplied An army’s fighting power by twenty.”

And I have heard the words applied to Arnold. His habit of ignoring the other side of questions, it has been urged, combined with his masterfulness of character, when brought to bear on young minds, exercised an influence on them, which, though undoubtedly powerful, was by no means free from serious drawbacks; and often had the effect of making his pupils dogmatists, or of weakening their hold on truth in after years, when they came to know the difficulties which surround all the serious problems of our complicated and rudderless time.

Were that criticism true it would be undoubtedly damaging; but, is it true? In preparing this address I once more read through his lectures on Modern History and Stanley’s Life, and rose from them with my own old memories and belief confirmed, that never was there a teacher who took more conscientious pains to understand himself, and make his pupils see all sides of, the political and social problems which met them in their reading. But, while scrupulously fair in weighing both sides, there was no faltering or counting the cost in his own verdicts—no “patting the devil on the back and calling him poor mistaken angel.” And I am inclined to think (though by no means sure at this distance of time that it is not a mere afterthought) that this vigour and directness may have made some of his pupils, though not those who had profited most by his teaching, more ready to take sides, and more sure of their own judgments, than young men on entering life ought to be. In my own case, at any rate—the only one in which a man can really speak with confidence—I think on looking back I can detect a readiness to take sides before I had qualified myself to judge which was right and which wrong. And perhaps this was more or less characteristic of a good many Rugbeians of that day, of whom it might be said in the words of Hosea Biglow—

“Nothin’ from Adam’s fall to Huldy’s bonnet That we warn’t full cocked with our judgment on it.”

But we paid for our haste. For one of the results of this characteristic was that old Rugby friends of that time were apt to find themselves, both at the universities and in active life, not only in opposite camps, but in sharp antagonism. There were burning questions then as now which divided men sharply, such as the Tractarian movement and the People’s Charter; and like Home Rule to-day were of a kind which tried friendships to the breaking-point. If you boys know A. Clough’s poems as you ought, you must remember those lines in which this pathetic side of the after-life of many of Arnold’s pupils, as it had been of his own life, is touched so vividly and tenderly:—

“Qua cursum ventus.

As ships, becalmed at eve, that lay With canvas drooping, side by side, Two towers of sail at dawn of day Are scarce long leagues apart descried;

When fell the night, upsprung the breeze, And all the darkling hours they plied, Nor dreamt but each the self-same seas By each was cleaving, side by side:

E’en so—but why the tale reveal Of those, whom year by year unchanged, Brief absence joined anew to feel, Astounded, soul from soul estranged?

At dead of night their sails were filled, And onward each rejoicing steered— Ah, neither blame, for neither willed, Or wist, what first with dawn appeared!

To veer, how vain! On, onward strain, Brave barks! In light, in darkness too, Through winds and tides one compass guides— To that, and your own selves, be true.

But O blithe breeze; and O great seas, Though ne’er, that earliest parting past, On your wide plain they join again, Together lead them home at last.

One port, methought, alike they sought, One purpose hold where’er they fare,— O bounding breeze, O rushing seas! At last, at last, unite them there!”

So far I have been able to speak with confidence, but I cannot do so on the next point. For I cannot be sure now whether it was while at school or after I had left, though I am quite sure it was from Arnold’s teaching, that I learnt the invaluable lesson in early life, that there are subjects—such as the origin of evil, and the co-existence of man’s free will and God’s omnipotence and omniscience—which lie beyond the range of the human intellect; and before which, if we are in a healthy moral state, we shall be content to sit down patiently and quietly, without attempting to solve problems which lie at depths which no lead or line of man’s invention can ever sound. Let me enforce this lesson in his own words—“It should always be remembered that there are difficulties in the way of all religion which can never be solved by human powers. Intellectually, we can point out the greater difficulties of Atheism and Scepticism. Practically, they yield to faith sought in God’s way by doing His will.” “Living thus by faith, a man finds that his course is one of perfect light: the moral result is so certain that he is sure he has truth on his side.”

I have tried to indicate the main lines of the education we got here fifty years ago (apart, of course, from our school studies). It was undoubtedly before all things training for a big fight—or rather for _the_ big fight to which we had all been pledged at our baptism, “manfully to fight under Christ’s banner against sin, the world, and the devil, and to continue His faithful soldiers and servants unto our life’s end.”

And has not this, my young schoolfellows, been the aim of all education in England worthy of the name since Alfred, a thousand years ago, caused to be written up on the walls of his schools,

“With all thy might Stand by the right, And be thou strong Against the wrong.”

It was probably brought more vividly before Rugby boys in Arnold’s time than has often been the case in our schools, as he was himself so essentially a fighting man—“one,” to use his own words, “whose spirit of pugnacity would rejoice in fighting out this battle in a saw-pit.” But the more you think of it, and the longer you live, the more firmly will you get to hold the truth, that you _must_ be fighting men if you would keep your self-respect, or do any stroke of work worth doing in this tough old world. If you learn here to make pleasure or comfort or success your aim, or to turn aside to any siren call from the steady summons of duty, depend upon it, even if you attain them, you will find long before you reach my age, that they have turned into ashes in your mouth, and are like Dead Sea apples, fair to look on, but only fit for the dust-heap.

There will always be plenty of men in all times, especially in old and rich countries, who take no side on great questions, having enough work and enjoyment to satisfy all their own wants, like Isaak Walton and his friends in our great civil war. Of them Arnold said, “I know not how the peaceableness of such persons can be either admirable or amiable”; contrasting them with Lord Falkland and others, who left the popular side when it was triumphing, and joined the opposite ranks without changing their principles or becoming renegades. Such men, he taught us, are amongst the noblest characters in history; but they change their sides not to conquer but to die—uncheered by sympathy, and therefore the purest of martyrs. These were the models he set before Rugby boys in my time, and lived up to himself. Our spokesman of that time, the most typical poet that Rugby has bred, sang of such—

“So thou but strive, thou soon shalt see Defeat itself is victory.”

Or, if that saying seem to you mere paradox, take this expansion of it in one of the noblest of his later poems—

“Say not the struggle nought availeth, The labour and the wounds are vain, The enemy faints not, nor faileth, And as things have been they remain.

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars; It may be, in yon smoke concealed, Your comrades chase e’en now the fliers, And, but for you, possess the field.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, Seem here no painful inch to gain, Far back, through creeks and inlets making, Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

And not by eastern windows only, When daylight comes, comes in the light, In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly, But westward, look, the land is bright.”

Well, my boys, I can fancy that by this time some of you are thinking that I might as well turn to the Rugby of to-day, if I have anything to say about it, instead of dwelling all the time on the old Rugby of half-a-century ago. And so I will turn, for the few minutes that are left to me, to the present and the future. But after all, the times differ much less, in this place at any rate, than would appear superficially. It is still the old fight you are training for as we were, and must be fought under the old banner and with the old weapons.

No doubt some of the old pitfalls have been filled up, and new ones opened by the enemy, who is always alert and on the watch for the laggards and the half-hearted. And, judging from my general experience—for as I have confessed already my special experience here is scarcely more than that of a stranger—I think that one of the sides on which the attack presses more than of old lies in the temptation and tendency to careless expense; and to a taking it for granted that the world is to be made easy for you; that you have all a sort of prescriptive right to enjoyments and advantages: or, as the Americans say, “to a good time,” without any special effort or vigilance of your own. Depend upon it, all such notions are lies, and come from the father of lies. The more you train yourselves here to do everything for yourselves—even in your games—to look for no good thing for which you have not strenuously striven yourselves—the better and happier men will you be in after-life. Happy is the man, has been most truly said, who can help himself, for he shall be waited upon. The most pitiable man in these, or indeed in any, times, is he who has only learned to ring a bell. And as to carelessness in expense, no doubt England is immensely richer than it was fifty years ago, and so probably you come mostly from richer homes than we did. But for all that, I am quite sure that there must be many boys here who are only kept here by friends to whom the cost is a serious consideration. To all such I would say that there is no discipline of more value than to learn to say frankly and positively, and to act on the words, “I can’t afford it.”

And now my time is up, and I have only to wish our noble old school and you of this generation who belong to it, God’s speed.

It is allowed to few men to revisit their old boyish haunts, and revive old school memories, after fifty years, and to come in touch with one company of that great host in whose hands the future of our England rests for good or ill, who are even now buckling on the armour which we are laying down.

If ever one of you should chance to come back here in 1940 to speak to the Rugby boys who will then be sitting on those benches, he will know how pathetic an experience it is: he will be able to appreciate the solemn but yet hopeful thoughts which crowd on me to-night—solemn indeed, but yet full of hope. For I will never believe that the living faith which was breathed into this school fifty years ago will ever be allowed to fade out while the world stands: the faith which made the Rugby of my time a missionary school, from which the whole higher education of England drew a new inspiration, and a new life: the faith, once more to quote Arnold’s own words, “which is the opposite of all idolatry, the doctrine of the person of Christ, not His church, not His sacraments, not His teaching: not even the truths about Him, or the virtues He most enforced, but Himself—the only object which bars fanaticism and idolatry on the one hand and gives life and power to all morality on the other.”

Keep Him alive in your hearts, my boys, and go forward bravely, you

“Who stand before us in this shade, The youth who own the coming years: Be never God or land betrayed By any son our Rugby rears.”[4]

Footnote 4:

It is not “Rugby” but “Harvard” in the original, which is taken from the Commemoration hymn written by the Rev. J. R. Lowell.

AN ADDRESS DELIVERED ON 12TH JUNE 1892, THE ANNIVERSARY OF DR. ARNOLD’S DEATH.

WE are gathered here on this great Christian festival to keep what I may, with our preacher of this afternoon, call our second founder’s day. I am sure that every good Rugbeian is proud of Queen Elizabeth’s sturdy and loyal grocer, who bore testimony to his “gracious lady and mistress” before Bishop Bonner and the other commissioners of her sister, at the risk of being burnt as a heretic in Smithfield. Lawrence Sheriff’s day, 20th October, will never be forgotten or neglected in this place. But, as the United States do wisely and well to recognise Abraham Lincoln as the second father and founder of their Republic, so may we rightly honour Thomas Arnold as the second father and founder of Rugby School, and set apart this 12th of June, the day on which he passed away here fifty years ago, as one to be kept sacred to his memory.

This Saint’s day then I hope and believe will be kept while Rugby stands, for in so keeping it we are carrying out his own wish, that the English Church might learn in the new time to restore, amongst other practices she has abandoned, “Commemorations of holy men of all times and all countries.”

This 12th of June is then the 50th anniversary of the death of our second founder, who was taken in the fulness of his strength, and in the hour of his triumph, when his long battle was really won, and his old university, and his country, were vying with one another to honour the man, who it was at last recognised had raised the true standard of education again in England, and had inspired it with a soul and a purpose which it had wanted since Elizabeth’s day.

I am here to-night to tell you what I can from my own experience of this great life’s work. First, however, let me give it you in the words of his poet son, from the lines on Rugby Chapel, which I hope are well known to most of you:

“O strong soul, by what shore Tarriest thou now? For that force, Surely, has not been left vain! Somewhere, surely, afar, In the sounding labour-house vast Of being, is practised that strength, Zealous, beneficent, firm!

Yes, in some far-shining sphere, Conscious or not of the past, Still thou performest the word Of the Spirit in whom thou dost live— Prompt, unwearied, as here! Still thou upraisest with zeal The humble good from the ground, Sternly repressest the bad! Still, like a trumpet, dost rouse Those who with half-open eyes Tread the border-land dim, ’Twixt vice and virtue; reviv’st, Succourest!—this was thy work, This was thy life upon earth.”

And surely such is the work still of such as he, the born leaders of men; and in the darkest hour, again and again will such as they come to our minds when our need is sorest.

“Beacons of hope, ye appear! Languor is not in your heart, Weakness is not in your word, Weariness not on your brow. Ye alight in our van! at your voice, Panic, despair, flee away. Ye move through the ranks, recall The stragglers, refresh the outworn, Praise, reinspire the brave! Order, courage, return. Eyes rekindling, and prayers, Follow your steps as ye go. Ye fill up the gaps in our files, Strengthen the wavering line, Stablish, continue our march, On, to the bound of the waste, On, to the City of God.”

Such prosaic details of personal experience as I can give you, my boys, will fall flat enough after a trumpet call like this; but they are what I am come here to give you, and I will try to give them as simply and truthfully as I can.

Nearly forty years ago, when I first came across, in Stanley’s _Life of Arnold_, a passage in one of his letters to a friend as to the treatment of unpromising pupils, describing it as “very often like kicking a football up hill,” the truth as well as the humour of the saying came home to me very vividly—“You kick it onwards,” he says, “twenty yards, and it rolls back nineteen: still you have gained one yard, and thus in a good many kicks you make some progress.”

Now I don’t believe that any boy had more reason than I to be thankful for this kicking-up process, and for the Doctor’s patient use of it. As long as you didn’t roll back _more_ than the nineteen yards he stuck to you, and used whatever germ he could detect of intellectual activity in you to rouse you, and hinder the fatal rolling back over the twentieth yard of the descent.

I will illustrate this by my own case. I went up to Rugby at ten from a preparatory school for Winchester, where a different grammar from the Rugby one was in use, and we were taught a different pronunciation of Greek. Partly owing to discouragement at first from this cause, but more to my inaptitude for languages and excessive fondness for games, I soon lost any real interest in the form work, and only did just enough to get my yearly remove. On the other hand I was fond of reading history and current literature, and knew more of both than most of my form-fellows. So for three years I was kicked slowly up the school hill, in no small danger all the time of rolling back over the twentieth yard, and so ending my school career. However, I managed to arrive safely in the Shell, though I fear with the character of a boy who took little interest in his work, and never did more than he could help.

In those days the Doctor used to come round once a month and examine each form in some book they had been reading, an ordeal which all but the brightest and best boys looked forward to with no little uneasiness. I was very low in the Shell when he came round to examine us in the first book of Horace’s Odes, and towards the end of the terrible hour asked the head of the form, who was construing the 11th Ode, what made the Romans so especially grateful to Augustus in his dealings with the Parthians. He and some other boys made shots, but the Doctor shook his head, and the question came slowly down past some thirty boys to me, when I timidly ventured “the recovery of the eagles and standards taken from Crassus.” “Quite right! Go up!” the Doctor said, evidently pleased; and I marched up for the first time to the top of my form. My stay in that exalted region was short, but from that time I felt his manner to me changed. He may have noticed, too, that I had taken a volume of Sir W. Raleigh’s _History of the World_ out of the school library, and found out that I was familiar with Scott’s poetry and novels. At any rate, from that time I used to fancy he always gave me an easy piece to construe, and instead of horrid questions on grammar and scholarship, would ask for some illustration of the passage from an English classic.

I will give the last instance I remember of this method in the Doctor’s teaching. It was in my last half at school when I had reached the lower bench of the sixth. We were reading the second book of Aristotle’s _Rhetorica_, and had come to the chapter on old men, whom that disagreeable philosopher describes as μικρόψυχοι—“small-souled”—caring about nothing great, but only what tends to the ease of their own lives. “Do you remember a striking illustration of this in one of Scott’s novels?” the Doctor asked the head of the school, Theodore Walrond.—No answer, and the question came all round the form,—when it came to me he paused for several seconds and seemed disappointed (so at least I thought) when he had to pass on. I shall remember the pang of self-reproach which shot through me to the last day of my life. No one answered, so he referred us to the end of the Abbot, where in her flight after the defeat of Langside, Queen Mary with her small band of devoted followers pause at the convent garden on the Border, where the old monk is digging. He leans on his spade watching them, as they ride off, and mutters, “I could pity this poor Queen and these men. But what are these things to a man of fourscore? and it’s a fine dropping morning for the young kale wort.”

As I have just told you, I shall always remember the sore feeling at having disappointed him whom of all men I most wished to please, when that question passed me. But this after all was only an intellectual failure. I wish I could stop here, but as I have come to make a clean breast to you my young schoolfellows, I have a further confession to make which I hope may be of use as a warning to some of you. I was captain of Big-Side in my last year, which, as you all know, involves the practical control of the Cricket and Football Funds. Now there was a custom in those days to have a School House supper on the last day before the Christmas holidays, the cost of which was paid out of the Big-Side fund. The Doctor’s leave had to be asked, but it was looked upon as a matter of course, and so, great and sore was the surprise and indignation, when on the eve of the Christmas holidays 1841, a message came from the Doctor that there was to be no house supper. There can be no doubt he was perfectly in the right, as “Big-Side fund” belonged to the whole school, and it was a misappropriation of trust funds to spend any part of it for the benefit of a single house. But this objection I don’t think occurred to any one, and the indignant athletes determined, as there could be no house supper, there should be a smaller one of select men for which no leave should be asked. The necessary funds could not have been reached except with my consent, and this I gave without thought, as I rather sympathised with the rebels; and I not only let them have the money but went to the supper. As old Thomas would of course give out no beer, several bottles of wine and spirits were smuggled into the house, with the result that some half-dozen of the wilder spirits got uproariously drunk, and besides destroying some of the Library books, made a serious row in the bed-rooms and damaged some of the furniture. I went off by an early train next morning, but was so thoroughly ashamed that I wrote, on reaching home, to the Doctor to tell him I had been at the party. I transcribe a part of his answer from the old yellow sheet which I have kept religiously from that day.

“FOX HOWE, Dec. 18, 1840.

“MY DEAR HUGHES—I did not know nor should I probably ever have known of your share in the business of Friday last had it not been for your own letter. Officially, therefore, I do not know it now—for of course it would be utterly out of the question to use your own letter as evidence against you. The matter therefore being set at rest so far as any public notice of your conduct is concerned, I have the less difficulty in writing to you fully and plainly, not as master of Rugby school, but as an old acquaintance of your father’s, and as a man who feels very sincerely interested about yourself. I cannot deny that your letter gave me a very great and unexpected shock; for I had no notion that you or any one else in the sixth form was concerned with the party. I have been so accustomed on these points to feel confidence in the sixth form, that I really am apt to have no suspicion whatever of them in such matters; and I am quite sure that if I am obliged to resign this confidence the school must speedily go to ruin. Farther, I think that according to my school recollections, good and steady fellows at Winchester would have taken no part in such a business, and it would grieve me very much to think that at Rugby such characters could not equally be depended upon—that companionship or any other motives might lead into mischief those on whom I ought to be able to rely.”

I will not quote further from this and another later letter; but, though no eye but mine has seen them till to-day, I felt that I could not honestly speak to you to-night without alluding to this matter. Perhaps some of you may have noticed in the anonymous dedication of _Tom Brown’s Schooldays_ to Mrs. Arnold, the words “who owes more than he can ever acknowledge or repay to her and her’s.” You will now perhaps understand them. It may also, perhaps, encourage some one here or there to take heart again, on seeing how a moral breakdown in early life, if wisely handled by a master like Arnold, may become a source of strength in later years.

These few memories of Arnold as headmaster may fitly close with his parting words to a favourite pupil, “Whatever profession you choose doesn’t much matter if you follow steadily our great common profession, Christ’s service.” I believe that our loyalty to his memory in this place would be as genuine if his work had begun and ended here, as our great Headmaster and second founder; but a crowd of the foremost of living Englishmen would not be going to meet in the Jerusalem Chamber to-morrow, to arrange for a worthy memorial to him in the Abbey, fifty years after his death, if he had not been a great benefactor to England outside these walls.

Let me in conclusion, then, glance shortly at his work for the nation. As an historian I believe there is not one of the brilliant group of writers of history in the last half-century but would acknowledge their debt to his example and his method; but I am not an expert, and so will say no more on this point. To some extent, however, I can speak as an expert as to the movement which has revolutionised the social and industrial life of England in the last fifty years; and with the exceptions, perhaps, of Mr. Maurice’s and Lord Shaftesbury’s, I know of no name which can be put before Dr. Arnold’s amongst those who, in the first rank, have helped to tide our country over the dangerous time of that crisis, which came to a head in Europe in 1848, and is still trying and proving every nation in Christendom.

After watching for years the condition into which the Corn Laws on the one hand, and the orthodox dogma of the Economists of that day (of salvation by _laissez-faire_—or by buying in the cheapest and selling in the dearest markets)—he was convinced in 1831, to put it in his own words, that a time was at hand “when the devil will fight his best in good earnest.” In the October of that year he wrote to a friend, after describing his field of wholesome and happy labour in his family and the school, “but my sense of the evils of the times, and to what prospects I am bringing up my children, is overwhelmingly bitter. All in the moral and physical world appears so exactly to announce the coming of the “great day of the Lord,” _i.e._ a period of fearful visitation to terminate the existing state of things—whether to terminate the whole existence of the human race neither man nor angel knows—that no entireness of private happiness can possibly close my mind against the sense of it.”

And so, as he could not close his eyes to the danger but was haunted by it, he set to work to combat “the two great opposite forms of human wickedness”—priestcraft and Benthamism—or, as he called them, “white and red Jacobinism”—and went into the fight with all the thoroughness and independence which made him such a power in whatever he undertook. He could find no place in which he could speak out in the Press, and so started a weekly journal of his own, _The Englishman’s Register_, without any illusion as to its prospects. “Every selfish motive,” he writes, “would deter me from the _Register_: it will be a pecuniary loss, it will bring me no credit, but much trouble and probably abuse, and some of my dearest friends look on it not only coldly, but with aversion. But I _do_ think it a most solemn duty to make the attempt.” He put his nephew, Mr. Ward, in as editor, writing the principal leaders himself and giving a general supervision. “The difficulty of the undertaking,” he soon found, “is indeed most serious. All the Tories turn from me as a Liberal, whilst the strong Reformers think me timid and half corrupt.” And again, “If I had two necks I should think I had a good chance of being hanged by both sides, as I think I shall by the one that gets the better if it comes to a fight; there is not a man in England who is less a party man than I am, for in fact no party would own me.” A year later he writes, “_Experto crede_, it is expensive work to push an infant journal up hill.”

The life of the _Register_ was short, but it did good work, and by introducing him to the _Sheffield Courant_ gave him the opening he wanted for the future. He was, I think, scarcely prepared for the flood of angry and scurrilous abuse and ridicule which the _Register_ drew on him (notably from Theodore Hook in the _John Bull_), but he was splendidly indifferent to it all. “It is an immense blessing,” was his answer to indignant friends, “to be perfectly callous to ridicule, or, which comes to the same thing, to be thoroughly conscious that what we have in us of noble and delicate is not ridiculous to any but fools, and that, if fools will laugh, wise men will do well to let them.” And again, “I have lived for many years in entire indifference to the opinion of people, unless I have reason to think them good and wise; and I wish my friends would share this indifference as far as I am concerned.”

It would be out of place here to go into any detail as to these political writings, or to do more than glance at his long struggle on the council of the London University for the necessity of maintaining a Christian character in national education. With astonishing patience he tried again and again to find a common ground with his colleagues, and only left them when convinced that it was hopeless, thereby drawing on himself more suspicion and attacks from quite a different quarter. “Better go on as we are than set up national education on any but a Christian basis,” was his final decision; for “the moment you enter on moral subjects—history or philosophy—you must be Christian or Antichristian.” And again, “What is the impartiality talked of? That a man shall be neither a Christian, nor yet not a Christian? The fact is, that religious veneration is inconsistent with what is called impartiality, which means that you see some good and some evil on both sides, and so identify yourselves with neither, and can judge of both. That is true of all persons and things human; not of what is divine. If Christ was no more than Socrates, I can speak of Him impartially: can judge Him: but if I believe in Him, I am not His judge, but His servant and creature. He claims the devotion of my whole nature, for He is identical with goodness, wisdom, holiness.”

And thus I come naturally to the last part of our subject, the influence of Arnold on the spiritual or religious life of England. In his last years the time of a great revival had come, which would cast that life, as it were, in a new mould—into what mould was the vital question. The decisive crisis was in its most acute phase when he passed away fifty years ago. How well I remember it, for I was at its very centre from 1842 to 1845, at Oriel, Arnold’s own college, and that of the foremost men in the Tractarian movement—of Newman, Keble, and Hurrell Froude, of Pusey, and Marriott, and Church—when Tract Ninety was dividing Oxford common-rooms into hostile camps, and its author was spending the last sad years at Littlemore before leaving the church of his fathers, and dragging with or after him some of the brightest and best of my contemporaries. It was a time of sore rebuke and distress to our church, and to none of its sons sorer than to Arnold, scores of whose pupils were in residence.

At Oxford in those years, Bishop Cotton, my last tutor here, had given me, when I left school, the volume of _Sermons on Christian Life_, published in 1841, and I had read the famous introduction again and again in the Christmas holidays before I went up to Oriel. The pathos of that appeal came right home to me, and I think, even if my reason and conscience had remained unconvinced, I could not have resisted it. “Mr. Newman’s system,” he wrote, “is now at its flood; it is daily making converts; it is daily swelled by many of those who neither love it nor understand it, but who hope to make it serve their purpose, or like to swim with the stream. A strong profession therefore of an opposite faith at the present moment must expect to meet with little favour; nor indeed have I any hope of turning the tide, which will flow for its appointed season, and its ebb does not seem to be at hand. But whilst the hurricane rages, those exposed to it may well encourage one another to hold fast their own foundations against it; and many are exposed to it in whose welfare I naturally have the deepest interest, and in whom old impressions may be supposed to have still so much force that I may claim for them, at least, a patient hearing.” But far from remaining unconvinced, both my reason and conscience went frankly and cordially with him when he urged, “Christ’s church is absolutely without a human earthly priesthood, for it has the eternal priesthood of Christ which leaves no place for any other; there is no priesthood without mediation, and we have one mediator, the man Christ Jesus. Do we want the priest for sacrifice? Nay, there is no place for him at all; for our one atoning sacrifice has been once offered, and by its virtue we are enabled to offer daily our spiritual sacrifices of ourselves, which no other man can offer for us. Do we want him for intercession? Nay, there is one who ever liveth to make intercession for us, through whom we have access to the Father, and for whose sake Paul, Apollos and Peter, and things present and things to come, are ours already.”

And so I and many others passed through that time unscathed, and all the more easily because he had also taught us that all there is of good, or noble, or self-denying, in this system is altogether independent of the doctrine of the priesthood—that there are many good practices in the Romish Church which it would be most desirable to restore among ourselves, such as “daily church services, frequent communions, memorials of our Christian calling continually presented to our notice, in crosses and wayside oratories, commemorations of holy men of all times and all countries; the doctrine of the communion of saints practically taught; religious orders, especially of women, of different kinds, and under different rules, delivered only from the snare and sin of perpetual vows.” So he pleaded in 1841. Half a century has gone by since those words were written. The movement which was to remould the Church, and human society through the Church, is still with us; several of the good practices which Arnold approved have established themselves already, the rest seem to be on the way. But how stands the crucial question of the priesthood? Is the Church Arnold loved so well and served so faithfully destined to lose all truly courageous faith, and to teach her children cowardly to crave for some man, as liable to sin as themselves, to stand between them and Christ, who has redeemed them, and bidden them to come straight to Him? Upon the answer which your generation will give to that question depends, I believe, more than upon anything else, the future of England. May it be that for which Arnold pleaded half a century ago, and which the brave old Poet Laureate has voiced for us of this generation who are passing away, in his latest words,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face When I have crossed the bar.

WILLIAM COTTON OSWELL AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT RUGBY SCHOOL ON 24TH JUNE 1894

I HOPE you boys in this last decade of the century are as great hero-worshippers as we were in the fourth. Speech-day, 1834, was the first I was at, as I had come as a new boy in February of that year, just sixty years ago. It was held at Easter then, in the middle of the long half-year, which lasted for five months with only a break of three days. That year, 1834, was a famous one for Rugby. At Oxford, Arthur Stanley had got a Balliol, and at Cambridge, Dean Vaughan a Trinity scholarship, while still sixth-form boys, and the reputation of the school was going up by leaps and bounds at the universities and in the country. But though we small boys were proud in a way of Stanley and Vaughan, of Clough and Burbidge, and other scholars and poets, we looked on them more as providential providers of extra half-holidays than with the enthusiasm of hero-worship. This we reserved for the kings of the Close, round whom clustered legends of personal encounters with drovers at the monthly cattle-fairs (which were then held in High Street, and came right up to the school gates, tempting curious yokels to trespass on the sacred precincts), or the navvies who were laying down the first line of the London and North-Western Railway, or the gamekeepers of a neighbouring squire with whom the school was in a state of open war over the right of fishing in the Avon.

I did not myself share this rather indiscriminate enthusiasm; for the kings of the Close were, as a rule, a rough and hard set of taskmasters, who fagged us for whole afternoons, and were much too ready with the cane. But for this very reason I had all the more to bestow on the one who, to my boyish imagination, stood out from the rest as Hector from the ruck of the Trojan princes; and this hero was William Cotton Oswell, whose portrait took its honoured place yesterday on the walls of our Rugby Valhalla. It was not from any personal knowledge of or contact with him, for we were at different boarding-houses and at opposite ends of the school; and I doubt whether he ever spoke to me in his life, though I often shared his kindly nod and smile when we met in the Close or quadrangle. It was the rare mixture of kindliness and gentleness with marvellous strength, activity, and fearlessness, which made him _facile princeps_ among his contemporaries. I don’t believe he ever struck a small boy here, or even spoke to one, in anger.

And so there was no drawback to the enthusiasm with which one watched him leading a charge at football, or bowling in a Big-Side match, or jumping two or three pegs higher on the gallows than any other boy. He cleared eighteen feet nine inches of water in Clifton brook, which means, as you know, at least twenty-one feet from take-off to landing. No doubt his good looks added to the fascination. You can see from the portrait what a noble face his must have been even in boyhood, and his figure was quite as striking. He stood six feet in his stockings when he left school at eighteen, but did not look his height from the perfection of his figure; broad in shoulder, thin in flank, and so well developed that he was called “the Muscleman.” I must not dwell on that time, so will give you one instance only of his early prowess in athletics. I don’t know what the record has been in late years, but in my time Parr was the only man who was ever known to have thrown a cricket-ball a hundred yards both ways. No record was kept here, but this I saw Oswell do. From a group of boys at a wicket on Little-Side ground, as it then was, he threw a cricket-ball, over as I believe, or at any rate through, the great elms (which were then standing in a close row at right angles to the school buildings) into the Doctor’s garden, for there it was picked up. Measure it how you will, that throw must have been considerably over a hundred yards.

He left a great blank in the school life in 1836. We heard he had gone to Haileybury for a year on his way to India, where he had got an appointment as writer. In those days there was no telegraph, no cheap post, no overland passage, and no penny papers to spread every scrap of news, true or false, over the whole kingdom. No one thought of a pleasure trip to India for a month or two in the winter to look up friends or young relations, for the voyage round the Cape even in the Company’s finest ships took from three to four months. The two worlds were wide apart, and the young subaltern or civilian was lucky who managed to get a run home once in ten years. So a curtain fell between Oswell and his old schoolfellows, which was not lifted, for me at any rate, for more than a generation. Now and again, at long intervals, thinking over schooldays, his figure would rise up as attractive as ever, and I would wonder what had become of him, and that no heroic rumour of him had floated back from the other side of the world.

You may fancy, then, the shock of joy which I felt when the lift came at last. I, like every one else, had rushed to get Livingstone’s first book on South Africa, and was deep in the second chapter, in which he details the drought at his station, the threats of the Boers, and the rumours of a lake and rivers and a rich country to the north that had determined him to attempt the crossing of the Kalahari desert which lay between, when I came on this passage: “I communicated my intention to an African traveller, Colonel Steele, and he made it known to another gentleman, a Mr. Oswell. He undertook to defray the entire expense of guides, and fully executed his generous intention.” Surely, thought I, that must be “the Muscleman,” or “handsome Oswell,” as we used sometimes to call him; that’s just what he would have done. I was not long in doubt; it was my boyhood’s hero sure enough. “Oswell was one of Arnold’s Rugby boys,” Livingstone wrote; “one could see his training in always doing what was brave, and true, and right.” Now let us see how it was that he managed to turn up in Africa at this critical moment.

In India he spent ten years, rising rapidly to the post of collector and judge. His station was thirty miles from the nearest English doctor, so he added the study of medicine to his regular work. This was heavy enough, but did not hinder him from joining any young Englishman who came to hunt. In one of these hunts he saved the life of the then Lord Gifford, shooting a tiger which his lordship, who was short-sighted, had not noticed, and which was in the act of springing. On another of these excursions the party encamped on ground full of malaria, and were struck with jungle fever, of which several died. Oswell, thanks to his splendid constitution, struggled through, after being insensible for several days. No sooner had he recovered consciousness than he set to work on a pile of his district papers—complaints from villages, reports of gang-robberies, etc.—with a wet towel round his head. He cleared his table at the cost of a dangerous relapse, the effects of which he could not shake off; so he was sent to the Cape on sick-leave, those who saw him embark doubting if he would ever reach the Cape alive.

Once landed, however, the dry warm air revived him, and in a few months he was away to the north, exploring and elephant-shooting, in which pursuits he came across Dr. Moffat, the great missionary Livingstone’s father-in-law, and Captain Steele, the hunter of big game, who directed him to Livingstone’s station, Kolabeng, two hundred miles to the north on the borders of the Kalahari desert. He had with him a brother sportsman, Mr. Murray, and they at once joined eagerly in Livingstone’s project to attempt to cross the Kalahari desert. “Mr. Oswell,” to repeat his words, “at once undertook to defray the whole cost of guides, and fully executed his generous intention.” They started on the 1st of June 1849, and reached Lake Ngami in two months, on the 1st of August, the first white men who had ever seen it. The story of their journey has been told both by Livingstone in his first book, and by Oswell in the chapter he wrote for the Badminton volume on _Big Game Shooting_, published after his death in 1893. I know no reading of more absorbing interest, but you should all read it for yourselves. And when you are reading, remember that the whole of Central Africa was a blank then on our school atlases, while every lake and river and mountain range is now laid down, right away to the Red Sea, the South Atlantic, and the Mediterranean. Here I can only give you the estimate that Livingstone formed of his companion before they got back to Kolabeng. “When my men wished to flatter me,” he wrote, “they would say, ‘If you were not a missionary you would be just like Oswell; you would not hunt with dogs.’ They declare he is the greatest hunter that ever came into the country.” His method was to get within twenty or thirty yards of his game—lion, elephant, or rhinoceros—whereas most men fired at fifty or sixty. Of course this doubled the danger while it made surer work, and his marvellous escapes were frequent. One I will content myself with on this journey, an encounter with a rhinoceros, which he killed at last, but which had tossed him and torn the scalp of his head almost off. Murray went to look for him, and told Livingstone, “I found that beggar Oswell sitting under a bush and holding on his head.” He had in fact adjusted his scalp, and the blood was streaming through his fingers. Let me here cite another witness or two as to his character as a hunter. Mr. Horace Waller, of the Oxford Mission, writes: “Livingstone, who knew no fear himself, spoke of Oswell’s desperate courage in hunting as quite wonderful; not but what he suffered from it to the day of his death, the result of an engagement with a rhinoceros. Oswell would, for instance, ride up alongside of a hyæna, and, unloosing his stirrup leather while at full gallop, brain the beast with the heavy stirrup.” Again, Sir Samuel Baker says: “His extreme gentleness, utter recklessness of danger, and complete unselfishness, made him friends everywhere, but attracted the native mind to a degree of adoration. He was the Nimrod of South Africa, without a rival and without an enemy, the greatest hunter ever known in modern times, the truest friend and most thorough example of an English gentleman.”

In April 1851 Livingstone started again from Kolabeng, this time with his wife and children, on the invitation of Sebituane, the great chief of the Makololo, who offered him a settlement wherever he might choose. Oswell was again with him, and went ahead of the waggons to dig wells and provide water; but even with this precaution the party, which included Mrs. Livingstone and the children, were at one point four days without it, and nearly perishing. Leaving Mrs. Livingstone and the children as the guests of Sebituane, Livingstone and Oswell explored north and east, and discovered the Zambesi River, and the great Victoria Falls from which it becomes navigable for ships to the Indian Ocean. For this he was voted the gold medal of the French Geographical Society. On their return Sebituane was attacked by inflammation of the lungs, and died in a few days. His death altered all Livingstone’s plans, and probably the subsequent history of the continent; for now Livingstone resolved to send his family home, and return alone the next year to find a way either to the west or east coast. He had already drawn his whole salary for 1852 and half that for 1853, and so would have been quite unable to start on the career which opened Africa and gained him a tomb in Westminster Abbey, but for Oswell; but _he_ proved the friend who “sticketh closer than a brother.” He accompanied them to Cape Town, and in Livingstone’s words “made all comfortable,” giving the children who were in rags a new outfit which cost £200, and enabling Livingstone to start once more for the north. He answered all remonstrances by laughingly protesting that it all came from ivory, and that the Doctor and his wife had as good a right as he to the money drawn from the preserves on their estates.

Before leaving his African career I must give shortly a characteristic story which was told incidentally by him in “South Africa Fifty Years ago,” and unconsciously, as though he were quite unaware of what I cannot but call its beauty and pathos. It is of his relations with an Africander who bore the (to us rather comic) name of John Thomas, one of the men he hired at the Cape to accompany him and Livingstone on their first expedition. The contract was that these men should be bound to go as far as the Lake Ngami, but no farther. When therefore Oswell and Livingstone determined to go on to the north, they called the men together and told them they need not go any farther, but could choose between waiting for their return or accompanying them. At first the men hesitated, and seemed likely to refuse to go farther, when Bono Johnny (as he was called by this time) jumped up, and in Dutch, which he spoke when excited, said, “What you eat I can eat, where you sleep I can sleep, where you go I will go; I will come with you.” The others paused for a moment or two, and then chorused, “We will go.” “Do you think after that,” Oswell writes, “it was much matter to us whether our brother was black or white?” Johnny stayed with him through four years, at the end of which Oswell wrote of him, “as a grand specimen of manhood, good nature, faithfulness, and cheerful endurance I have never met his equal, white or black.” Johnny at the last moment begged his master to take him over to see England, which he did, and got him a temporary place as coachman to his brother, a country parson. A few weeks later Oswell met Johnny in the village with the cook on one arm and the lady’s maid on the other, and found that they were going on with his education, which Oswell had begun in the bush, the cook undertaking his reading and the lady’s maid his writing. At the end of six months Johnny had to return to Africa, and Oswell lost sight of him. It was eighteen months before they met again. Oswell, who had volunteered on the outbreak of the war with Russia, was carrying secret service money for Government in the East, and came across the camp of the Sixtieth Rifles. He was talking to an officer from horseback, when he felt a hand laid on his off stirrup, and looking round found Johnny there, who had become messman to the regiment and was in high favour. He jumped down, and they had a long African talk, and from that time till Johnny’s death Oswell kept his eye on him, and got him at last a place as butler to a friend in England, where, as everywhere else, he made himself indispensable by cheerful and faithful service. There Johnny was struck by a fatal illness, and died in a few hours. “I heard of his illness,” Oswell writes, “too late to see him on earth; but I trust master and man may yet meet as brothers in heaven.”

The modesty and self-depreciation of his character were strong to the end. Looking back at his relations with Livingstone, he writes in “South Africa Fifty Years ago”: “He could talk to the Kaffir ears and hearts, we only to their stomachs; but I would fain believe his grand work was made a little smoother by our guns.” I should rather think it was. Thus, when a tribe in Livingstone’s district was on the point of starvation from the long drought, and the people reduced to mere walking skeletons, he and Murray took more than six hundred men, women, and children with them, fed them for several months till they were “all fat and shining,” and sent them back with a store of dried meat enough to last for months, without one missing, sick, or feeble.

How one wishes that England were still represented by Oswells in South and Central Africa! Happily Rugby again has sent one such in Mr. Selous, who has sustained the high type set by Oswell in early days. But I much question whether the ordinary type of African sportsman of to-day will benefit Africa, or raise the native enthusiasm or admiration for Englishmen. A few days ago I was reading a review of the last book published by two of them on African sport. They would seem to have taken with them a staff of trained servants, and horses and donkeys loaded with supplies sufficient to have made the adventure at any rate quite comfortable. Small blame to them for that, you will say, if they could afford it; and I agree. But what shall we say as to their method of shooting lions? It seems to have been, to tether an unfortunate donkey in a clearing, and leave him there for hours till a lion sprang on the poor shuddering jackass and had taken a good suck at his blood, and then to shoot him from a neighbouring place of safety. Well, we will say at any rate that Oswell would probably have as soon thought of tethering his black brother Bono Johnny for bait to a lion as a poor jackass.

To go back to our story. After sending off Mrs. Livingstone and the children, Oswell followed to England for family reasons, and was at home when the Crimean War broke out a year later. He at once volunteered, as I have already told you, went out to Constantinople, and was employed by Lord Raglan to carry despatches and secret service money to Sir Lintorn Simmons at Shumla, and on other missions. On the fall of Sebastopol he returned to England, and at once, without waiting for the shower of titles and decorations which came when peace was made, the old longing for wandering and adventure being still strong, sailed for South America, in November 1855. On board the mail-steamer he met his future wife, who was going out to her sister, Lady Lees, the wife of the Chief Justice of the Bahamas. After wandering through Chili, the West Indies, and the United States, he came home, renewed his acquaintance with Miss Agnes Rivaz, who had also returned, and they were married. From that time he settled down to the quiet life of an English country gentleman, built himself a house at Groombridge, near Tunbridge Wells, which he filled with his African trophies, and found a sphere for his energy in his parish and neighbourhood. Every neighbour who needed him became his special care. To the poor he was not a mere benefactor, but each man’s and woman’s and child’s personal friend. His Indian experience here came into play. Every little ailment or accident was a certain summons to “the Master,” as he was generally called; and if remonstrated with he would smile and say, “there was something in being able to send for a doctor whom they had not to pay.” He was an enthusiastic gardener, and the whole neighbourhood was stocked with plants and flowers from Hillside. His great strength remained to the end. One day calling at an old friend’s he found him very ill, and his wife and son consulting how he could be moved. In a moment he was in Oswell’s arms, carried and placed gently in the place they had prepared for him. The Paris Geographical Society, as has been said, had sent him their gold medal, and he was made a Fellow of the English Society; but, writes Francis Galton, another African explorer and admirer of Oswell, “he was too shy and modest, and could not be induced to take that prominent share in those stirring times of the Geographical Society which was his right, and which he was often urged to take.” In the same way, though an excellent recounter to friends of his exploring and sporting experiences, he steadily resisted the offers of publishers and the persuasion of friends to take the public into his confidence in print.

It was only in the last year of his life that he was induced to put pen to paper as to his hunting and exploring work. Happily the editor of the Badminton Library persuaded him to write in the volume on _Big Game Shooting_. The result was the chapters on “South Africa Fifty Years ago” in that volume, which in my judgment stand quite foremost in our sporting literature. Read them, and, while the interest is absorbing, you will not find a trace of that delight in and relish for mere slaughter which is so offensive in most books of sport. Here is a short characteristic quotation, which will give you the mood in which the mighty hunter looked back on his own exploits. “I am sorry now for all the fine old beasts I have killed: but I was young then; there was excitement in the work; I had large numbers of men to feed, and every animal _except three elephants_ was eaten by man, and so put to good use.[5] I filled their stomachs, and thus in some mysterious way, as they assured me, made their hearts white.”

On the other hand, the zest for the old desert life of his early manhood comes back even as he writes: “There is a fascination to me in the remembrance of the free life, the self-dependence, the feeling as you lay under your kaross that you were looking at the stars from a point on the earth whence no other European eye had ever seen them; these are with me still, and were I not a married man, with children and grandchildren, I believe I should head back to Africa again and end my days in the open air. Take the word of one who has tried both; there is a charm in the wild life; the ever-increasing never-satisfied needs of the tame my soul cannot away with.”

I could call a dozen well-known witnesses to confirm everything I have said as to the charm of a character to which Lamartine’s saying, “Rien n’est si doux que ce qui est fort,” applies more truly than to any one I can remember. I will cite one only whose testimony will, I know, be of special interest here, as it comes from an intimate friend of Oswell, but not a Rugbeian, Lord Rendel. “He carried, as well as deepened, the stamp of Rugby at its best; fearless of soul and body, yet tender, kindly, gay; wise with a large experience, but utterly unworldly, I would, as an Etonian, give all the mere gentlemen Eton could breed for a handful of such men as Oswell. Manliness without coarseness, polish without complacency, nobility without caste! May Rugby keep the mould, and multiply the type!” Amen!

Footnote 5:

These three elephants, which he regrets were not eaten by man, were shot by him away from camp in order to send the valuable ivory to an Englishman who was shooting in the neighbourhood, to buy a supply of lead, Oswell having run short, and the nearest store at which he could buy being fourteen hundred miles away to the south. Mr. Webb, of Newstead Abbey, the sportsman in question, sent the ivory back to Oswell with a liberal gift of bars of lead, and they became intimate friends.

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Transcriber’s Notes

▪ Printers’ errors, punctuation, and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected. ▪ Variations in hyphenation have been preserved ▪ New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.