Another pupil writes of these sermons: "I used to listen to them from first to last with a kind of awe, and over and over again could not join my friends at the chapel door, but would walk home to be alone; and I remember the same effects being produced by them, more or less, on others, whom I should think Arnold looked on as some of the worst boys in the school." The influence at Rugby under Arnold was thoroughly Christian, though never sectarian. Harry East, the friend of Tom Brown (Thomas Hughes) went to Arnold to talk with him about being confirmed. "When I stuck," says East, "he lifted me, just as if I had been a little child; and he seemed to know all I'd felt, and to have gone through it all. And I burst out crying--more than I've done this five years; and he sat down by me and stroked my head; and I went blundering on.... And he wasn't shocked a bit, and didn't snub me, or tell me I was a fool ... and he didn't give me any cut-and-dried explanation. But when I'd done, he just talked a bit--I can hardly remember what he said yet; but it seemed to spread round me like healing, and strength, and light; and to bear me up and plant me on a rock, where I could hold my footing and fight for myself. I don't know what to do, I feel so happy." While Arnold loved his boys, and felt the keenest interest in them, he did not forget his own mental requirements. "He is the best teacher of others," he said, "who is best taught himself; that which we know and love we cannot but communicate.... I hold that a man is only fit to teach so long as he is himself learning daily. If the mind once becomes stagnant, it can give no fresh draught to another mind; it is drinking out of a pond instead of from a spring.... I think it essential that I should not give up my own reading, as I always find any addition of knowledge to turn to account for the school in some way or other." While his great desire for his boys was "moral thoughtfulness: _the inquiring love of truth going along with the devoted love of goodness_," he insisted on liveliness in his teachers: "It is a great matter to make these boys understand that liveliness is not folly and thoughtlessness. A schoolmaster's intercourse is with the young, the strong, and the happy; and he cannot get on with them unless in animal spirits he can sympathize with them, and show them that his thoughtfulness is not connected with selfishness or weakness.... He who likes boys has probably a daily sympathy with them."