UNIVERSITIES : ACTUAL AND IDEAL. 51 



their parent, the faculty of arts, though the latter always asserted and 

 maintained its fundamental supremacy. 



The faculties arose, by process of natural differentiation, out of the 

 primitive university. Other constituents, foreign to its nature, were 

 speedily grafted upon it. One of these extraneous elements was forced 

 into it by the Roman Church, which in those days asserted with effect, 

 that which it now asserts, happily without any effect in these realms, 

 its right of censorship and control over all teaching. The local habi- 

 tation of the university lay partly in the lands attached to the mon- 

 astery of St. Genevieve, partly in the diocese of the Bishop of Paris ; 

 and he who would teach must have the license of the abbot, or of the 

 bishop, as the nearest representative of the pope, so to do ; which 

 license was granted by the chancellors of these ecclesiastics. 



Thus, if I am what archaeologists call a " survival " of the primitive 

 head and ruler of the university, your chancellor stands in the same 

 relation to the papacy — and, with all respect for his grace, I think 

 I may say that we both look terribly shrunken when compared with 

 our great originals. 



Not so is it with a second foreign element, which silently dropped 

 into the soil of universities like the grain of mustard-seed in the par- 

 able ; and, like tliat grain, grew into a tree in whose branches a whole 

 aviary of fowls took shelter. That element is the element of endow- 

 ment. It differed from the preceding, in its original design to serve 

 as a prop to the young plant, not to be a parasite upon it. The 

 charitable and the humane, blessed with wealth, were very early pene- 

 trated by the misery of the poor student. And the wise saw that 

 intellectual ability is not so common, or so imimportant a gift, that it 

 should be allowed to run to waste upon mere handicrafts and chares. 

 The man who was a blessing to his contemporaries, but w^ho so often 

 has been converted into a curse, by the blind adherence of his pos- 

 terity to the letter, rather than to the spirit, of his wishes — I mean the 

 "pious founder "^gave money and lands, that the student who was 

 rich in brain and poor in all else might be taken from the plough or 

 from the stithy, and enabled to devote himself to the higher service 

 of mankind ; and built colleges and halls in which he might be not 

 only housed and fed, but taught. 



The colleges were very generally placed in strict subordination to 

 the university by their founders ; but, in many cases, their endowment, 

 consisting of land, has undergone an *' unearned incremjbt," which 

 has given these societies a continually-increasing weight and impor- 

 tance as against the unendowed, or fixedly-endowed university. In 

 Pharaoh's dream, the seven lean kine eat up the seven fat ones. In the 

 reality of historical fact, the fat colleges liave eaten up the lean uni- 

 versities. 



Even here in Aberdeen, though the causes at work may have been 

 somewhat different, the effects have been similar ; and you see how 



