18 THE MODERN UNIVERSITY MOVEMENT 
founded, as the words go, ‘ in particular to provide instruction 
in such sciences and arts as are applicable or ancillary to the 
manufacturing, mining, engineering, and agricultural industries 
of the County of York’. In the promotion of studies nothing 
succeeds like success. Kindle the intellect at any point and 
the fire will spread. You may be intent upon teaching science 
that is ‘ancillary to manufacturing industry’, but as your 
students grow there will be rebels who cry out for philosophy 
and Greek, because their hunger takes that form. The 
different tastes and aptitudes will assert themselves, and be 
they ever so remote from those you had in view, you find 
somehow that in gratifying them, you have added an intellectual 
light whose rays will reach and illumine the quarters where 
they were least expected. 
I know of only one danger that may yet threaten our 
university, and I am happy to say that I think it remote. If 
any man, or body of men, should acquire the power to step 
in among us and direct that our teaching should comprise 
anything that partook of sectarianism, then indeed I should 
despair. It is a proposal that might come in a fair and an 
alluring form, but it is one which, in my opinion, should 
be resisted at any cost whatever. I am sure I need not 
enlarge upon this subject. I am sure I need not protest 
that to take this view does not necessarily imply a disregard 
of that third sphere of human activity to which I have so far 
hardly alluded, I mean the sphere of moral activity. 
This leads me to the last part of my subject. In many 
ways the most anxious question connected with our new 
universities is this—what impress are they going to make on 
the whole man, on the morals and character of our students? 
I am willing to concede that we here touch the most important 
side of the whole question and face our greatest difficulties ; 
but even here I am not the least disposed to repine. 
No one who has the least knowledge of Oxford and 
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