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had the duty of teaching, their pupils examining and the privilege of conferring degrees, The uniunder distinct statutes. versities became important institutions holding a monopoly of Instead of public instruction.

of

consisting of a few compara-
tively isolated and transitory
lecturers of distinction, each uni-
versity established a continuity,
maintained by resident professors
and graduates. With such a de-
velopment and the increase of their
wealth, there came to the univer-
and
sities increase
power
permanence, but subject to the
accompaniment of lack of spon-
taneity, for "it is the professor
and not the charter which really
makes the university." And the
Popes stepped in, claiming to
recognise, sanction, and regulate
these growing institutions, giving
in exchange for the power yielded
to them, an authority throughout
Christendom to the degrees granted
by each separate university, which
might otherwise have conferred,
at least for a long period, only a
local prestige.

As circumstances are, the university has other functions than the school; it might indeed have been the parliament of mind and head of all educational work, but the universities have lost, for the present at least, their natural position as the instruments of national education.

The first-class schools of the day turn out young men as well educated for practical purposes as are most of those who have succeeded in satisfying the university examiners of their worthiness to pass to a degree. There is a certain diprestige or hall-mark, of minished value, it is true, from that formerly possessed by it, in this degree; and the student has received a certain tincture from his passage through the course of

study, and the associations of the
place, which may be of the highest
value. It is not of this, however,
that we propose to speak, but of
those who do more than merely
satisfy an examiner, those from
whom are drawn the members that
constitute the strength and per-
manence of a university, and distin-
guish it from a school. A large
number of these are held to the
bosom of their kind mother by
offices, fellowships,
sympathy, esprit.

tradition,

A body of elect, drawn by
adequate intellectual tests from the
body of the nation; proved in
character, known to one another,
strengthened by the support of
their fellows, dowered at will with
all that is to be known, held back
by their own historic tradition
from "raw haste;" trained to
wait wisdom's bloom, rather than
run to seed or grow to weed, with-
drawn from the meaner fret of the
world, with leisure to contemplate
its larger issues; such are the
members that partake of the en-
dowments of the ideal university:
What do they for us?

What have they to do but act
as schoolmasters of a superior
kind? we can imagine to be the
objecting question of the ordinary
But here we have
practical man.
an opinion from one of the wisest
of Dons, which will lead our
thought into a different channel
from that of the views of the un-
informed critic :-

"A growing mind is often a
more serviceable instructor to a
learner than a formed mind; hence
the well-known fact that the young
often learn more from a young
tutor, just a little their senior,
than from an accomplished man of
science." Pattison.

If, then, there are a sufficient number of these young men of energy to carry out the scheme of instruction, the powers of those

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grown old and wise enough for deeper thought and wider work are to spare.

The actual work of teaching being done by the younger professors, at the colleges, and by private tutors, the elders become Fellows, and have to do rather with men than youths, with the problems outside rather than inside the university. They may act as senators in the University Parliament, regulate its practices, inform it with their special wisdom, but that need not so monopolise their energies as to shut them out from larger use. Neither, indeed, need those who are actual lecturers be wholly absorbed by that special work.

When we affirm that the proper function of the permanent element of a university is to teach ideas to the nation, the sour thought will arise in the minds of many that we do not want ideas; what is the good of idealism to us?

Turning again to the Rector of Lincoln College, we find :-"Every one of us is, consciously or unconsciously, working out this double problem, to combine specialty of function with generality of culture." To bring the thought to a lower plane: a man must earn his bread in the world, but that problem solved, is seeking how to be a free man, and earn the bread of Heaven, which is wisdom. And that wisdom, if it be real and not fanciful, will bring with it aid rather than obstacle to the earning of the bread of the world.

Hatred of ideas can only arise from stupidity, in which case the state is rather one of "inaccessibility to ideas"; from a low and brutalised state which shrinks from everything elevating; from the disappointing experience of weak and misguided pretenders to ideas; or from miscomprehension of the term and misapprehension of the

thing.

Ideas are simply principles, capable of informing practice because drawn from experience, which is combination of, and deduction from, facts; or they may be partly due to the rarer flash of insight which is genius, and gained we know not how. The form, or idea, of the American axe has at last reached this country, the protests of the " inaccessibles " being at length estimated at their true value. If a man ignorant of axes had to perform a certain work of felling trees, and were given a score axes to use at will, he would probably end in selecting the best. The man accustomed to his grandfather's axe only would take the instrument that resembled it most. But if he were accustomed to ideas also, they would fight with him until he became as wise as the man who trusted to the unbiassed experience of the event. Ideas and experience are at one.

The Churches are wrangling, the scientists are making abstruse discoveries; politics, social life, religious thought, are almost a chaos for lack of ideas, round which fit externals might cluster as steel filings about the pole of a magnet.

What is required is not novelty; there is abundance of useful thought in the world which only requires arrangement. In the history and records of philosophy can be found philosophy itself; in past experiences distilled into principles may be found the lost clues of politics; within the wrappages that have taken the name of religion may be found its live heart and proclaimed anew; the anomalies of our social and economic life may be detected by rigorous and logical application of principles, detail by detail; all this would be fit work for sober minds in the

learned leisure of the ideal university.

"Education," says Whewell, "necessarily holds to the past. To act in the hope of introducing into the University course every novelty which attracts admiration in the world, would be to bewilder and intoxicate those whom we ought to direct and discipline." Just as

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bad would it be to reflect worthless novelties back upon the world; but those dowered with ideas would find for novelties their place, for there are really no novelties, but only developments of the application of ideas. sane idea, supported by its analogies and evidences, need provoke no controversy; but were such to arise, it would be limited by logic and refined by reason. But whatever the result, the sphere of the university as a home of thought and the centre of the minds it has trained, ought to be not merely of academical but of national activity. And its teaching, if it were the teaching of principles drawn from experience, and the teaching of the habit of the use of principles for guidance, would be fruitful beyond

measure.

Said Prof. F. W. Newman in 1843 [Pref. to (Huber's) "English Universities"]:

"If for the last two centuries the universities had grown healthily and moderately, no faster change might perhaps now be requisite than actually went on for thirty years together; but they need a more than juvenile vigour, such as can only be gained by either new elements or new organs, to expand proportionally to the free intellect which has been formed without them, and every day wins upon them."

There is a stir in the universities; there has been a throwing off of shackles. Those who are conscious of the waning of university influences in the complex bustle of modern life may find a hopeful

lesson in Mr. Mark Pattison's observations, which are strictly in the style of the ideal university:

"The fact that it is more than three hundred years since the universities ceased to be metropolitan centres of learning and science, seems to throw an unpractical air over the suggestion that they should now become such. What has not been for so long, cannot, it is thought, ever be again. There must be some reason in the nature of things against it. After so long a desuetude, the privilege must have lapsed. To meet this prejudice, it is enough to cite the case of the German universities, which, like ourselves, slept from the Reformation till the latter half of the eighteenth century. We are only now setting about an operation which was gone through in Germany a century back."

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Organisation is a mighty power. The Essays and Reviews," take it, were rather a university than an ecclesiastical outcome. As an effort in a particular direction, how strong they were, and of how much stronger influence than if they had been scattered anonymously over periodicals, or written by men ignorant in a general sense of the drift of one another.

Attention to ideas, to the principles underlying daily experience, would gradually tend to simplification of statement of them. Principles are essences which may go in a very small compass and are pleasanter to take than watery dilutions. And with a little trouble taken to make its form perfectly clear, an idea may be inculcated upon an ignorant mind more readily than a congeries of conflicting

external facts. The teacher may draw his ideal result from a multitude of instances; but once let it be caught by the mind of the most ignorant-and be it re

membered the mind loves to expand to an idea when encouraged to do so it will not be lost as easily as the memory of a fact, and it will gather spontaneously for itself such analogies and supports as may be existent in, or occur to, the mind into which it has found entrance.

The true limitation of the power of the teacher of wisdom is that minds in a really low state prefer depraved forms to perfect ones. A glaring, gaudy ornament will attract the savage mind much more than the most exquisite result of harmony. This attraction to the grotesque rather than the beautiful may fairly have its analogies in the spiritual. Moody and Sankey, with their highly coloured Inferno and rhapsodical Elysium, attract those to whom the words "The kingdom of heaven is within yourselves" would be meaningless. But there would be nothing to labour for if minds were all perfect crystal for inspiration to pass through in unimpeachable logical form. It is no reason for the withholdment of ideas that they have to make their way by their own expansive power.

The ideal method, if we may judge from the ideal masters, rather than from the fanciful and incomprehensible pseudo-idealists. who claim to be followers, is not to force upon unprepared minds ideas that are foreign, strange, or too large for them at once to expand to; but to discover for them the principle inherent in that which they are upon, and so make their business a thing of life to them. The terrible warning, "Cast not your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet and turn and rend you," is not to be forgotten; but the dangerous course is that neglect which limits the scope of the best influences by not carrying them outwards into something appreciable by the

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coterie, when they ought to be copying Nature's method in the message of the mother to her child. Ideas are spiritual forms; the glow of them, which is love, is caught first, for Love is ultimate Lord; but the cultivation of the faculties is required before they become intellectually appreciable; just as with a young child much of the test and correction of experience is necessary before it can realise even natural objects in the manner ordinary to man.

Ideas form the standard which, consciously or unconsciously, we have before our eyes in aiming at any object; whether our aim be high or low depends on the character of those ideas, and whether they are the best we can lay hold on. If means are not taken to enable the mind to entertain such ideas, there can be no orderly conduct save through instinct among the simple, and by fear among those of complex capacity. Where fair ideas are not, grow dwarfish phantasms, caprices and prejudices, which find bodies of selfishnesses, and hold disorderly rule.

Modern prophets have said that the ancient irruptions from the hardy, barbarous North, which were wont to upset civilisations that had lost earnestness in luxury, might one day find their

counterpart in eruptions from below. The "lapsed masses," held neither by loving nor intellectual sympathy, would claim to possess the world by such rude hold as pleased their fancy best.

False hierarchies have so obscured the idea of the true, that perhaps few realise that they are most happy when imparting to those who look to them for protection, and absorbing from such as are their natural superiors; not being subordinated in personality but held spell-bound as regards any quality, so long as the condition of its communication continues. Said one who was a Father himself, We call those that have instructed us, Fathers.

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Until the Churches realise what one who is at once of the Church and the University (C. Wordsworth) proclaims as the ancient and noble theory that to aim at all science is to aim at theology,"—and such realisation seems a long way off, there is work to be done for which great powers are needed; and such are to be found in the linked minds of the ideal university, if yet somewhat dormant in the real. There is the trained capacity for thought and the leisure for its exercise; there are stored ready for use the history and philosophy of the world. Wisdom is the sleeping princess ever ready to respond to the awakening kiss of the earnesteyed prince. Those who win her ought to do something for very glow and gratitude on behalf of those who are powerless to enter upon the same quest for themselves.

Amid the petty strife of sects, it may appear positively ludicrous to some who have almost reached Pyrrhonism by living so long in chaos, to talk of ideas as of calm, beneficent, harmonious powers. But the sole reason of such miserable

confusion is that the dominant ideas are missing; we require more ideas, and above all, that they come with integral form, not scarred by prejudice, or wizened through bigotry, but large with honest love. We turn with delight to the words of Jowett, who, from the intellectual observatory, if we may so speak, of his university position, speaks thus hopefully of that which at present gives rise to the hottest strife, the Scriptures on which the national religion claims to support itself:"Could all be brought to an intelligence of their true meaning, all might come to agree in matters of religion. That may seem to be a hope deferred, yet not altogether chimerical. If it is not held to be a thing impossible that there should be agreement in the meaning of Plato or Sophocles, neither is it to be regarded as absurd that there should be a like agreement in the interpretation of Scripture. The disappearance of artificial notions and systems will pave the way to such an agreement."

This leads us to the connection of the Church with the University. In the ideal Church and the ideal University, the leading minds are at one on the philosophy of their religion. Personal religion, which is not creed but life, dwells in all, and here again there is unity. But the function of the Church is to bring the reality of this religion, and something of this philosophy, to help the feeble and the ignorant; the function of the university is to keep philosophy fresh and bright by use, to impart knowledge for special uses, to gather and convey the lessons of history, and to be the store-house and source of ideas. The Church has to give comfort and example to the people of feeling; she spreads out and becomes parochial, with most varied uses; the

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