The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1844. Excerpt: ... THE LIFE THOMAS ARNOLD, D. D. CHAPTER VIII. LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE SEPTEMBER 1835 NOVEMBER 1838. In the general features of these three years there is little to distinguish them from those which precede. The strong feeling against him, though with some abatement of its vehemence, still continued; the effect of it was perhaps visible in the slight falling off in the numbers of the school in 1837-38, at the time of the very height of its academical reputation; and in his own profession it appeared so generally to prevail, that when the present Bishop of Norwich proposed to give him the opportunity of removing some of the misapprehension of his opinions, by preaching his Consecration sermon at Lambeth, the Archbishop of Canterbury thought it his duty to withhold his permission, solely on the ground of the unfavourable reception which he supposed it would meet among the clergy. But his letters, and some of the Sermons in the fourth volume preached at this time, show how this period of comparative silence was yet, both in thought and action, VOL. II. B I most emphatically his period of battle; when, as if tired of acting on the defensive, he was at last roused to attack in return. The vehemence of the outcry by which he had been assailed, drove him into a more controversial atmosphere. The fact of the more positive formation of his own opinions brought him more immediately into collision with the positive opinions of others. The view with which he thus entered on his chief actual contests with what he conceived to be the two great evils of the age, is expressed in the twentieth Sermon in the fourth volume, preached September, 1830, on the opposite idols of unbelief and superstition, and on the only mode by which, in his judgment, either could be counteracted....