The change in educational methods has been very much influenced by the decay of the belief in original sin. The traditional view, now nearly extinct, was that we are all born Children of Wrath, with a nature full of wickedness; before there can be any good in us, we have to become Children of Grace, a process much accelerated by frequent castigation. Most moderns can hardly believe how much this theory influenced the education of our fathers and grandfathers. Two quotations from the life of Dr. Arnold by Dean Stanley will show that they are mistaken. Dean Stanley was Dr. Arnold’s favourite pupil, the good boy Arthur in “Tom Brown’s School Days”. He was a cousin of the present writer, who was shown over Westminster Abbey by him as a boy. Dr. Arnold was the great reformer of our public schools, which are viewed as one of the glories of England, and are still conducted largely according to his principles. In discussing Dr. Arnold, therefore, we are dealing, not with something belonging to the remote past, but with something which to this day is efficacious in moulding upper-class Englishmen. Dr. Arnold diminished flogging, retaining it only for the younger boys, and confining it, so his biographer tells us, to “moral offences, such as lying, drinking, and habitual idleness”. But when a liberal journal suggested that flogging was a degrading punishment, which ought to be abolished altogether, he was amazingly indignant. He replied in print: I know well of what feeling this is the expression; it originates in that proud notion of personal independence which is neither reasonable nor Christian, but essentially barbarian. It visited Europe with all the curses of the age of chivalry, and is threatening us now with those of Jacobinism.... At an age when it is almost impossible to find a true manly sense of the degradation of guilt or faults, where is the wisdom of encouraging a fantastic sense of the degradation of personal correction? What can be more false, or more adverse to the simplicity, sobriety and humbleness of mind, which are the best ornament of youth, and the best promise of a noble manhood? The pupils of his disciples, not unnaturally, believe in flogging natives of India when they are deficient in “humbleness of mind”. There is another passage, already quoted in part by Mr. Strachey in “Eminent Victorians”, but so apt that I cannot forbear to quote it again. Dr. Arnold was away on a holiday, enjoying the beauties of the Lake of Como. The form his enjoyment took is recorded in a letter to his wife, as follows: