It is well to be a gentleman, it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life; these are the connatural qualities of a large knowledge; they are the objects of a University . . . but they are no guarantees for sanctity or even for conscientiousness; they may attach to the man of the world, the profligate, the heartless.

Which is why for Dr Arnold, the Christian basis of education took priority. His headmastership came at a time when the public schools were notoriously dissolute. At Eton, John Keate, headmaster from 1809-1834, sought to assert some degree of control by mass floggings. But in 1834 the Quarterly Journal of Education reported that "before an Eton boy is ready for the University he may have acquired . . . a confirmed taste for gluttony and drunkenness, an aptitude for brutal sports and a passion for female society of the most degrading kind, with as great ease as if he were an uncontrolled inhabitant of the metropolis." Public opinion would no longer tolerate this kind of thing. It looked for moral leadership, and three years before Queen Victoria ascended the throne, the new headmaster of Rugby stepped forward with charismatic earnestness to provide it. Arnold's sermon on "Christian Education", preached in Rugby Chapel, begins: "This is the simplest notion of education; for, undoubtedly, he is perfectly educated who is taught all the will of God concerning him, and enabled, through life, to execute it." Arnold expected his praepostors, or prefects, to work with him, and with God, to defeat evil. 

It is difficult to disentangle what Dr Arnold was really like from the heroic legend constructed around him after his death in 1842 aged only 46. His former pupils sang his praises: Arthur Stanley, later Dean of Westminster, in The Life of Arnold, published in 1844, and Thomas Hughes in Tom Brown's Schooldays, published in 1857. Many of Dr Arnold's carefully chosen staff revered him and went on to become headmasters too. His fame grew throughout the 19th century and in 1896 a bust of him was erected in Westminster Abbey, alongside one of his son, the poet and critic Matthew Arnold.

Dr Arnold's personal influence naturally diminished as those who had known him died. As Alicia C. Percival remarks in Very Superior Men, her study of some early public school headmasters: "The practical use of prefects in a school society remained . . . but the search for the Christian community —though no 19th century public school head would have wished to be considered as having abandoned it — appeared less urgent."