Ch. 9: A General View

We have looked at Oxford life in so many different periods, that now, perhaps, we may regard it, like our artist, as a whole, and take a bird's-eye view of its present condition. We may ask St. Bernard's question, WHITHER HAST THOU COME? a question to which there are so many answers readily given, from within and without the University. It is not probable that the place will vary, in essential character, from that which has all along been its own. We shall have considered Oxford to very little purpose, if it is not plain that the University has been less a home of learning, on the whole, than a microcosm of English intellectual life. At Oxford the men have been thinking what England was to think a few months later, and they have been thinking with the passion and the energy of youth. The impulse to thought has not, perhaps, very often been given by any mind or minds within the college walls; it has come from without--from Italy, from France, from London, from a country vicarage, perhaps, from the voice of a wandering preacher. Whencesoever the leaven came, Oxford (being so small, and in a way so homogeneous) has always fermented readily, and promptly distributed the new forces, religious or intellectual, throughout England.

It is characteristic of England that the exciting topics, the questions that move the people most, have always been religious, or deeply tinctured with religion. Conservative as Oxford is, the home of "impossible causes," she has always given asylum to new doctrines, to all the thoughts which comfortable people call "dangerous." We have seen her agitated by Lollardism, which never quite died, perhaps, till its eager protest against the sacerdotal ideal was fused into the fire of the Reformation. Oxford was literally devastated by that movement, and by the Catholic reaction, and then was disturbed for a century and a half by the war of Puritanism, and of Tory Anglicanism. The latter had scarcely had time to win the victory, and to fall into a doze by her pipe of port, when Evangelical religion came to vex all that was moderate, mature, and fond of repose. The revolutionary enthusiasm of Shelley's time was comparatively feeble, because it had no connection with religion; or, at least, no connection with the religion to which our countrymen were accustomed. Between the era of the Revolution and our own day, two religious tempests and one secular storm of thought have swept over Oxford, and the University is at present, if one may say so, like a ship in a heavy swell, the sea looking much more tranquil than it really is.

The Tractarian movement was, of course, the first of the religious disturbances to which we refer, and much the most powerful.

It is curious to read about that movement in the Apologia, for example, of Cardinal Newman. On what singular topics men's minds were bent! what queer survivals of the speculations of the Schools agitated them as they walked round Christ