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indeed, they have contented themselves with cutting off the additions which 
had been made to it in the Middle Ages, each sect supplying the place by 
fresh additions adapted to its own character and tendencies. That mankind 
owe a great debt to that morality and to its early teachers I should be the 
last person to deny ; but” (and here comes in the passage quoted by Mr. 
English) “ I do not scruple to say of it that it is in many important points 
incomplete and one-sided, and that unless ideas and feelings not sanctioned 
by it had contributed to the formation of European life and character, human 
affairs would have been in a worse condition than they now are.” What 
Mr. Mill says, therefore, is that the moral teaching of the first five centuries 
of the Christian era was of that character ; but he expressly excludes the 
moral teaching of our Lord, whereas Mr. English makes him call it the New 
Testament morality. No doubt if Mr. English had gone a little further into 
Mr. Mill’s book he would have found matter which we should all take serious 
exception to, as in this passage : — “ It can do truth no service to blink a fact 
known to all who have the most ordinary acquaintance with literary history, 
that a large portion of the noblest and most valuable moral teaching has been 
the work not only of men who did not know, but of men who knew and 
rejected the Christian faith.” That is certainly very strong, but it is of no 
use to misrepresent or misquote Mr. Mill on other points. And now with 
regard to that quotation from Adam Smith. I have been looking into Adam 
Smith, and I found, as I expected, that he gives no citation to enable 
me to refer the passage which Mr. English has taken from him to any author 
of the Augustan age, or thereabouts. But the preceding paragraph is so 
exceedingly loose, that much of the language may have been written any time 
within the first two centuries. It is absurd to suppose that it was written in 
the Augustan age ; and, as I have already pointed out, a few T years with 
regard to morality sometimes involve the whole issue, whether it comes from 
a pagan or from a Christian source. We must know distinctly the date of 
any author before we can bring him into contact with the four gospels, and 
that is a point of which I am exceedingly jealous. As Mr. Reddie has pointed 
out, moral philosophy is in a most lamentable condition, and we cannot speak 
too strongly of this. If I were ten years younger, I would see if I could not 
do something to improve it. So far as Oxford is concerned, moral philosophy 
is in my opinion in a declining state, I am sorry to say. In my day much 
weight was attached to Bishop Butler. I am not prepared to say that he really 
gives us a full exemplification of Christian philosophy ; but now he is very 
little studied at Oxford, and in his place Mill and others are brought in to be 
studied. I am really afraid that moral philosophy at Oxford at this moment 
has much of the atheistical about it. 
Kev. Dr. Thornton. — All that I should have said on the paper before us 
has been very accurately and ably said already, and I should not have risen 
at all, had it not been that the ears of an Oxford man are very sensitive, 
when he hears his university mentioned ; and as I myself have been con- 
cerned there for some time with tuition, I must, after what has been said by 
Mr. Row, attempt to defend my university a little. The study of moral 
