Playing Rugby on Saturday afternoons and public school sport generally is an assertion of a theological principle. For the Greeks - especially after Plato - the body is merely the prison of the soul. Jews and Christians understand body and soul to be united in forming the whole person. The doctrine of the Incarnation, that God became Man, that the Word became Flesh, is the most audacious assertion of this. Resurrection therefore involves the body. Not in a resuscitation such as the ancient Egyptians hoped for by preserving the remains, but a glorification, in which the vigour of youth, the wisdom of age, the innocence of childhood, the strength of adulthood, the power of health and the vulnerability of the infant and the infirm are all brought together at last so that, no longer spread out in time, I can be whole and complete.
Thomas Arnold, the great reforming Headmaster of Rugby, understood this and set out to educate and train not merely the minds, but also the bodies of the children in his care. So organized school sport was born. Haileybury's first Master, AG Butler, had worked with Arnold and was a friend of his, and Haileybury always asserted this outworking of the doctrine of the Incarnation - that schools should play sport.
In a paper read to the Anglo - Catholic Congress of 1927, Neville Coghill (Tr 1913), later to put Chaucer into fine modern English, quoted William Blake in an arresting line:
"The Body is that part of the soul which is perceived through the five senses."
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