era were rather antagonists than servants of the clergy; but in which clerical influence has since, through a combination of accidents, become supreme. That the University owes its greatness to its connection with the Church is, in one sense, most true. These, like all the other institutions of Christendom, owe, and will continue to owe, their greatness to the spirit of Christianity, which, regardless of the barriers erected between one Christian community and another by clerical schisms and state creeds, still pervades and secretly unites the divided frame, everywhere sustaining selfdevotion, the source of greatness; and which perhaps has often been present, though uninvoked, at the beneficent labours of the study and the laboratory, while it has been absent, though invoked, from the formal rites of an intolerant and cruel state religion. The presence among us of a large proportion of students and men of learning devoted to a spiritual calling is also of inestimable value, provided that they will be content to use the University and exert their due influence in it without making it their slave. But no one, without setting at defiance the plainest facts of academical history, can pretend that this University, as a seat of learning and science, has been greatest when it has been most under the dominion of the clergy. It was greatest, as has been said already, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when it was the centre of mental activity in all departments, and really led the intellect of the nation. It was least great, or rather it was most degraded, in the eighteenth century, when it was absolutely in the hands of the clergy and of the High

Church party among the clergy, and when learning and science were almost exiles from its walls, education sank into a farce, the professorial chairs were silent, and so much of the time of the Heads and Fellows as was not consumed in deep but dull potations,' was spent in fomenting High Church conspiracies against the peace and liberty of the nation. Even Theology has failed to profit in any way by the efforts of a clerical legislature to put every other subject of study under her feet: and monopoly in this case, as in others, has proved most injurious to the monopolists themselves.

If the University has recently revived, and become more useful and an object of greater respect to the nation; if great reforms have been made, our revenues more fairly distributed, and our fellowships and scholarships opened to merit; if physical science, jurisprudence and political economy have been recalled, or are being recalled, from their long banishment, and the chairs of their teachers are being properly endowed; all this has been done notoriously under the pressure of public opinion, notwithstanding the opposition of the clerical party, as represented by its most influential leaders, though, it must be gratefully acknowledged, with the aid and under the guidance of some members of the order, among the highest in intellect, and, if to engage the confidence of cultivated and independent minds is a service, not among the lowest in their services to religion.

As a seat of science especially the University seems as far as possible from owing any greatness she may

possess to clerical dominion, particularly at the present crisis. An antagonism has evidently arisen between science and theology, the source of which lies not in the nature of the subjects themselves (for it would be absurd to suppose that truth could be the antagonist of truth) but in the difference of the modes in which they have respectively been studied. Science has been studied at once freely and with humility, by that method of patient and conscientious investigation which, for purposes obviously connected with our moral training, the Creator has prescribed as the sure and the only road to truth. Theology has been studied neither freely nor with humility, but dogmatically, that is at once slavishly and arrogantly, in a way that never has led, nor, till the ordinances of the Author of Truth are changed, ever will lead to the attainment of the truth. The natural consequence is, that while science has rapidly advanced and obtained a great and too engrossing dominion over the mind of man, theology has fallen into decay: it has fallen into decay so completely, that philosophers of a certain school are beginning, not without plausibility or without success, to represent it as merely a transitory and now extinct mode of explaining phenomena, of which science offers the true and final explanation. This state of things will doubtless be reversed so soon as theology begins to be studied by as sound a method as science; and science will then lower its pretensions to their proper level and recede into its own domain. But in the meantime it is not to be expected that the two studies should be very good friends to each other, or that their votaries should be free from mutual

suspicion. Not that men of science are, as a class, irreligious. As a class they are probably far less irreligious than ordinary men of the world, even those men of the world in whom clerical confidence is most reposed; nor do they, generally speaking, show any tendency to renounce Christianity, or to separate themselves in life or death from the communion of Christendom. They are in fact still held in allegiance by those substantial and rational truths of Christianity which barren and irrational dogma only overlays. But they would be sinners against the light that is in them if they did not recoil from mere absurdities, particularly when tendered in a damnatory form and stamped as falsehoods to all uncorrupted minds by their connection with a spirit of persecution. Hence the existence of science in the University of Oxford is a hard struggle against theological jealousy, which sometimes breaks forth in rather animated expressions. The motives of the theological party are such as ought not for a moment to be impugned. They are contending for what they rightly think a higher object against an object which they rightly think lower, though it is to be hoped that they are wrong in thinking the two incompatible. But there can be little doubt that if their wishes had prevailed science would scarcely have been re-admitted into the University: and there can be as little doubt that if their wishes could now prevail, it would either be banished once more, or studied and taught under such conditions as would render it the scorn of the intellectual world. Such a result would be peculiarly adverse to the greatness of the University at a moment when science, owing

to its recent achievements, and still more to the ground of certainty which its conclusions afford amidst the apparent uncertainty and inconclusiveness of theology and philosophy, enjoy's an exceptional degree of reverence, so that, without it, no intellectual institution can command the confidence of men.

The latter part of the clause last quoted asserts, "That the Church could not safely entrust her future clergy to persons who had given no security for their soundness in the faith." We will not here discuss the assumption that tests, so often taken with a smile by open unbelievers, are securities for soundness in the faith. But we must ask what assurance the Oxford Council who framed this document, or even the Prelates and others who afterwards signed it, can have of their own competency thus to speak for the national Church. The national Church legally speaking is the English nation: while the practical arbiters of clerical education are the holders of Church patronage, who form the "congregation" by which "ministers" are "lawfully called" to their office in an establishment. And it may be pretty confidently predicted that the nation at large, and the holders of patronage if they shared the general sentiments of their countrymen, would continue to prefer clergymen trained in a place of free education, even though it might contain some Dissenters, to clergymen trained in an exclusive "seminary" under teachers of their own order. Reaction has not gone so far as to make the English people forget their dislike of priests and Jesuits, or of spiritual guides trained