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590 Old Price's Remains. respect for the man makes me wish to explain it as favour¬ ably as possible ; and my theory is as follows:—Arnold was eminently a man of progress ; a searching student both of scripture and everything else which he thought worth studying; and I do not doubt that, in the secret school of God the Spirit, he arrived ultimately at that most humiliating point, the reception of salvation, as an undeserved gift, bestowed, instead of merited punishment, at the hands of an offended but reconciled God. This, however, being too commonly the last resource, (and espe¬ cially with those who, from mental or social superiority, seem to have somewhat to boast of,) it is likely that Dr. Arnold passed through a transition state of doubts and difficulties; and I can only suppose that in such a tempo¬ rary condition of soul he wrote these remarkable sermons. The gospel of Christ crucified, as an all-sufficient atone¬ ment, may have seemed to him (as it has to many a sin¬ cere striver for entrance at the strait gate) " too good to be true;" and I am sure he was too honest to set forth any way of escape in which he had not yet learnt to place entire confidence; whilst he had too much light to bid these guilty children look back to the " laver of regenera¬ tion," instead of forward to the Cross. This may account for his keeping back, habitually and as the rule, that ac¬ cepted " blood on the mercy seat," to which the terrors of the law, bringing us all in guilty, ought to be merely an introduction, as the means to an end. It is to be hoped those poor probed and scarified boys heard each Sunday, in Rugby Church, the healing message for which the chapel sermon might prove an excellent preparation. But at any rate, whilst this earnest, high-minded, single-hearted man went on to perfection, not as though he had already* * Nil actum reputans, dum Quid superesset agendum."