Oxford Bigotry and Oxford Studies. 75 



of the renowned Dr. Hodgson the late principal might have been 

 with the bishops under Tory domination, those who knew his power 

 in the University as well as in his own college "can best tell : but the 

 mantle of Hodgson has not fallen on his vice-principal, nor are the 

 bishops able or willing to second the movements of academic bigotry, 

 as they might have been in years past. The days for such things are 

 past, never to return. Oxford doctors may, if it so pleases them, 

 go on working their poor spite against all that are not as tight-laced 

 in high-church bigotry as themselves ; they may denominate church- 

 reform as spoliation : they may term every dissent from their own 

 dissenting communion, the sin of Jeroboam. Letitbeso. Itisnotwon- 

 derful that those, who in the sixteenth century imprisoned and put to 

 death the reformers and those who a century and a half later were 

 bitter foes to the Protestant succession, should be succeeded in the nine- 

 teenth century by men, who cling with insane fondness to every anti- 

 quated usage and financial abuse in the church which renders it odious 

 in the eyes of all except those interested in the maintenance of its 

 vicious system. 



Quern Deus vult perdereprius dementit. A day of reckoning is at 

 hand. Those who are honestly engaged in the gradual and judicious 

 correction of abuses in church and state will not forget Oxford, 

 will not fail to make it fully available as a place of education for the 

 Clergy and the Laity, even if it should be necessary in pursuance of 

 their duty to remove those from power, who have the means of re- 

 tarding or hindering the work of reform. 



From the above observations it may be fairly concluded, that Ox- 

 ford is struggling for a position as an ecclesiastical authority, which 

 neither her own intrinsic merits nor the spirit of the times will allow 

 her to maintain, Oxford, however, is not a mere theological semi- 

 nary : it is a great and powerful establishment for national education 

 for the education of the influential classes of the British community : 

 and although the church has contrived as the monks did before 

 them to ensure for itself the monopoly of the college riches, it will 

 not be out of place in an article devoted to the University of Oxford 

 to consider its merits as an institution for educating the laity. 



It is scarcely necessary to inform our readers, that several articles 

 have appeared during the last twenty-five years in the " Edinburgh 

 Review," most severely lashing the abuses of the Oxford system. We 

 have no intention to enlist ourselves in the forces of so virulent a foe 

 of Alma-mater as the Edinburgh reviewer ; but we shall freely avail 

 ourselves of his indisputably accurate knowledge of the University 

 history, while we endeavour to show, how its character as an edu- 

 cational establishment has been deteriorated by a departure from the 

 Laudian statutes. In Anthony Wood's " Historia etAntiquitates Uni- 

 versitatis Oxoniensis" (Ed. 1674, p. 342) we read, " Velle Carolum 

 constabat, ut Sodalitiorum omnium Prasfecti adscriptis nominibus pro- 

 fiterentur se codicem ilium tamquam veram regiminis et obsequii 

 norrnam amplecti ; utque eodem de statutishisce atque olim de veteri- 

 bus iis observandis ac tuendis juramento obstringerentur." If the 

 authorities of this Jacobite university had testified their love of the 

 Stuarts by a strict obedience to his injunctions, we should have been 

 ble to say, that the first Charles had at least done one goodthing, 



