Arnold, THOMAS, D.D., head-master of Rugby, was born June 13, 1795, at East Cowes, in the Isle of Wight. In 1807 he was sent to Winchester, and remained there till 1811, when he was elected a scholar of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Having taken a first class in classics (1814), he was next year elected a fellow of Ariel, and he gained the chancellor's prizes for the Latin and English essays in 1815 and 1817. As a boy, we are told, he was shy and retired; as a youth, disputatious, and somewhat bold and unsettled in his opinions; but before he left Ariel, he had won the good opinion of a college which at that time boasted of such names as Copleston, Davison, Whately, Keble, Hawkins, and Hampden. He took deacon's orders in 1818, and the year after settled at Laleham, near Staines, where he occupied himself in preparing pupils for the university. In 1820 he married Mary Penrose, daughter of a Nottinghamshire rector, and sister of one of his earliest friends. Nine years were spent in this quiet life; he was preparing himself for the arduous post he afterwards occupied; he was developing his opinions, and he had also already commenced his great undertaking, the History of Rome. It was a period which he himself looked back upon with loving memories. His letters at this epoch reveal to us a fine ambitious spirit bending cheerfully to the task of tuition, more useful than glorious; they also prove to us that those views of a religious and political character which afterwards distinguished him, were maturing in the privacy of Laleham. In one he expresses, in a somewhat sportive and familiar manner, the great principle which he afterwards contended for with so much earnestness, that there should be a Christian laity, a Christian legislature, a Christian government; by which he did not mean a system of laws or government formed in the manner of the Puritans, out of texts of Scripture rashly applied, but imbued with the spirit of the New Testament and of the teaching of Christ. It was at Laleham, too, that Arnold first became acquainted with Niebuhr's History of Rome. This was an era in his life. It produced a revolution in his historical views, and his own History of Rome was modelled, almost too faithfully, on that of the great German.
From Laleham he was called to undertake the arduous duties of the head-mastership of Rugby. On these he entered in August 1828. Without dwelling on the details of that system of public education which he perhaps carried to its perfection, we may take notice of the high tone, moral and religious, which he infused into the school. He had the tact to make himself both loved and feared. He guided with great dexterity the public opinion of the school. 'In the higher forms,' says his biographer, 'any attempt at further proof of an assertion was immediately checked. "If you say so, that is quite enough; of course I believe your word;" and there grew up in consequence a general feeling that it was a shame to tell Arnold a lie—he always believes one.' On one occasion, when he had been compelled to send away several boys, he said: 'It is not necessary that this should be a school of 300, or 100, or of 50 boys, but it is necessary that it should be a school of Christian gentlemen.'
But the school was far from occupying Arnold's whole energies. The History of Rome went on; he took part in all the great questions of the day, political and theological. In politics he was a Whig, without being fettered by the ties of party. In the theological discussions of the time, he was chiefly distinguished by the broad views he had adopted of the nature of a Christian church. As already intimated, it was his leading idea that a Christian people and a Christian church ought to be synonymous expressions. He would never tolerate that use of the word church which limited it to the clergy, or which implied in the clergy any peculiar sacredness, or any trace of mediatorial function. The priest was unknown to him in the Christian community; this placed him at once in antagonism to the High Church party; and even Low Churchmen complained that he did not set sufficient value on their sacred order. But all, of whatever party, admitted and admired the zeal with which he taught that the full spirit of Christianity should permeate the whole of our civil or political life. If he seemed to lower the altitude of the clergy, it was only because he would raise the general level of the laity. He was convinced that 'the founders of our present constitution in church and state did truly consider them to be identical, the Christian nation of England to be the church of England; the head of that nation to be, for that very reason, the head of the church.'
In domestic life Dr Arnold was most happy; here he was distinguished by unfailing cheerfulness and spirit. In 1832 he purchased Fox How, a small estate between Rydal and Ambleside; and in this charming retreat he enjoyed in the vacations, amongst the family circle, his own uninterrupted studies. In 1841 he received from Lord Melbourne the Regius Professorship of Modern History at Oxford—an appointment accepted with great delight. He delivered some introductory lectures, which were heard with enthusiastic interest; and it was his intention, on his retirement from Rugby, to enter with zeal upon the duties of his professorship. But this and all other literary enterprises were cut short by a sudden and most painful death. The journey to Fox How was to be taken in a few days, when he was seized with a fatal attack of angina pectoris. Few biographies end more abruptly or more mourn- fully; but he met his death with perfect fortitude and Christian hope, on 12th June 1842. He is buried in Rugby Chapel. His principal works are six volumes of Sermons (best ed. 1848); an edition of Thucydides (3 vols. 1830-35); the History of Rome (3 vols. 1838-43), broken off by his death at the end of the second Punic war; and his Oxford Lectures on Modern History (1842).
See the admirable Life and Correspondence of Arnold by Dean Stanley (1845; 12th ed. with additions, 1881); a small Life by Worboise (1897); a work on his educational influence by J. J. Findlay (1897); and another by Fitch on the influence on English education of Arnold and his son Matthew (1897).