person of superior excellence, the tendency is to an over-exact imitation
of specific acts and methods, which, precisely because they are
spontaneous and fitting in his case, will not be so in the case of his
copyist; while the biography of an eminently good man enlists our sympathy
with his spirit rather than with the details of his life, and stimulates
us to embody the same spirit in widely different forms of duty and
usefulness. Thus the school-master who in Dr. Arnold's lifetime heard of
his unprecedented success as an educator, would have been tempted to go to
Rugby, to study the system on the ground, and then to adopt, so far as
possible, the very plans which he there saw in successful operation,--plans
which might have been fitted neither to his genius, the traditions of his
school, nor the demands of its patrons. At the same time, the interior of
Rugby School was very little known, the principles of its administration
still less, to persons other than teachers. But Arnold's biography,
revealing the foundation-principles of his character and his work, raised
up for him a host of imitators of all classes and conditions. Price, who
converted his immense candle-factory near London into a veritable
Christian seminary for mutual improvement in knowledge, virtue, and piety,
professed to owe his impulse to this enterprise solely to the "Life of
Arnold," and like instances were multiplied in very various professions
throughout the English-speaking world. In fine, example is of service to
us, not in pointing out the precise things to be done, but in exhibiting
the beauty, loveliness, and majesty of moral goodness, the possibility of
exalted moral attainments, and the varied scope for their exercise in
human life. Even he whose example we, as Christians, hold in a reverence
which none other shares, is to be imitated, not by slavishly copying his
specific acts, which, because they were suitable in Judaea in the first
century, are for the most part unfitting in America in the nineteenth
century, but by imbibing his spirit, and then incarnating it in the forms
of active duty and service appropriate to our time and land.

Finally, and obviously, *the practice of virtue* is the most efficient
means of moral self-culture. As the thought uttered or written becomes
indelibly fixed in the mind, so does the principle or sentiment embodied
in action become more intimately and persistently an element of the moral
self-consciousness.