personal knowledge of the candidate's character as a faithful and obedient member of the Church. In fact, proposals for relaxing the stringency of the tests have actually been made by some of those who think it necessary to maintain the system of exclusion. These persons perceive the immorality of the present system; and if their measures of concession do not obtain more support among their. friends, it is mainly perhaps because their friends feel that tests of religious opinion have been generally condemned by the sense, conscience, and experience of mankind, and that though it may be possible, in a certain condition of political parties, to cling to those which remain, it would be impossible, if these were abandoned, to enact new tests in their place. In truth, who can look the present system fairly in the face without seeing at once that it is immoral? A man presents himself to receive the final reward of his industry as a student, a reward in which the friends who have supported him at the University have an interest as well as himself, and the renunciation of which involves not merely the direct loss of the degree or fellowship *, but the fatal stamp of social nonconformity and of an eccentric mind. You contemplate the possibility of his being unwilling to subscribe to such a mass of doctrine as the Thirtynine Articles, either from a doubt as to its being • Subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles is not necessary for election to a fellowship; but it is necessary for holding one; Fellows generally being required (as was stated in the Preface) to take the M. A. degree. unmixed truth, or simply because he feels that it is his duty to God to keep his conscience free: otherwise there would be no need of tests at all. Yet you call upon him to subscribe as the condition of his receiving the reward. Do you not hereby wilfully and deliberately tempt him, by the bribe of worldly advantages, and the threat of worldly degradation, to lie to God and to his own soul? Such a system may serve the political interests of an Establishment, but is it possible that it can serve the spiritual interests of the Christian Church? Can it long stand before the awakened moral sense of mankind? If we were not made callous by official custom and party casuistry, should we fail to perceive that no imaginable sin against the God of Truth can be greater or more deadly than that of deliberately corrupting the spirit of truth in a young heart? The Articles contain several hundred propositions of Theology. They bear upon them throughout the evident marks of the element of doubt and controversy out of which they arose. They are in their nature an attempt to settle questions of opinion by an arbitrary exercise of political power: and those by whom the power was wielded were men, to say the least, *It need hardly be said that the Sixth Article, which asserts that there never was any doubt in the Church as to the authority of any book of our Canon, is a most sinister monument of the controversial exigencies of the framers. The same thing may be said of the opening sentence of the Preface to the Ordination Service,-"It is evident unto all men diligently reading the Holy Scriptures and ancient authors, that from the Apostles' time there have been these orders of Ministers in Christ's Church; Bishops, Priests, and Deacons." The word diligently seems to betray a consciousness of the character of the statement. actuated more by motives of state than by motives of religion, and whose characters were such that it would be not so much an absurdity as a blasphemy to suppose that their spiritual perceptions could supersede the voice of God in conscience as the criterion of religious truth. The imposition of the Articles on Oxford is historically connected with the name of the Earl of Leicester, then our Chancellor, a villain assuredly, and probably the murderer of his wife. Parliament itself, which, so far as the laity were concerned, was, and still is, the legal imponent, ratified these formularies only after considerable discussion; and even then limited subscription to those Articles "which only concern the confession of the true Christian faith and the doctrine of the sacraments," a limitation which was arbitrarily disregarded in practice by the bishops *. Who can pretend to be assured that formularies so framed, under such circumstances, and by such hands, are absolute and final truth? If we have no assurance · * It was on this occasion that a remarkable conversation passed between Mr. Wentworth, the most distinguished assertor of civil liberty in the House of Commons, and Archbishop Parker. "I was," says Wentworth, "among others the last Parliament sent for unto the Archbishop of Canterbury, for the articles of religion that then passed this house. He asked us why we did put out of the book the articles for the homilies, consecration of bishops, and such like.' 'Surely, Sir,'. said I, 'because we were so occupied in other matters that we had no time to examine them how they agreed with the word of God.' 'What,' said he, 'surely you mistake the matter, you will refer yourselves wholly to us therein !' 'No, by the faith I bear to God,' said I, 'we will pass nothing before we understand what it is, for that were but to make you popes: make you popes who list,' said I, 'for we will make you none.' See Hallam, Const. Hist. chap. iv. 1 that they are absolute and final truth, how can it be just to impose them upon the consciences of men? And what true policy can bid us outrage justice? : Is it to secure unanimity of opinion on religious subjects in the Universities that the legislature imposes these tests? If so, we have an argument against the continuance of the system, the validity of which statesmen never fail to recognize. Decisive experience has shown that it entirely fails to secure the object for which it was instituted. There is not unanimity, but the greatest diversity of opinion, in the Universities and this diversity extends, the advocates of the present system themselves being witnesses, not merely to secondary questions, but to the fundamental principles of faith. The division is not kept secret, but is displayed in fierce controversies and mutual persecutions. Nor is it only of to-day or yesterday. It appeared with equal violence in the times when the Arminians, headed by Laud, were contending with the Puritans for the possession of Oxford. It has appeared alike at every period when intellect has been active and conscience has been awake. It has slumbered only in seasons when intellectual torpor and spiritual indifference prevailed in the University, in the Church, and in the nation at large. What new error or heresy is it feared that Oxford will produce if conscience is unfettered? Is it feared that she will produce Roman Catholics? Is it feared that she will produce Free Thinkers? Do not the very facts which are cited by the advocates of the tests to scare us from emancipation prove conclusively that the evils which it is said would arise from freedom, exist in their most dreaded form under the present system? And is it not among the clergy, who are doubly and trebly bound by tests, rather than among the less fettered laity that these evils arise? It is not wonderful that this should be the case. By forcing a mass of questionable doctrine upon the now awakened consciences of men at an early period of life, you can hardly fail to produce in their minds a premature uneasiness and restlessness on these subjects. By tyrannizing over conscience you can hardly fail to arouse a rebellion against your tyranny which will probably be carried by the sense of wrong far beyond the bounds of rational resistance. The test fails to promote, or rather tends to defeat, the object with which it was instituted. It is felt as a great grievance by a large number of persons. Can there be a more complete case in the eye of a statesman for remedial legislation? We shall be told, perhaps, by a certain school among our opponents, that the Church guarantees to us the truth of the Articles, and absolves conscience from all need of inquiry, and from all risk of committing a sin by unhesitating acquiescence. We are bound at least to ask, What Church? If the visible Church, the patent fact is that even according to the estimate of high Anglicans, who exclude Protestants from the Church, and include only themselves, the Roman Catholics, and the Greeks, an overwhelming majority of the visible Church rejects the Thirty-nine Articles, and pronounces that they are not only not |