British Quarterly Review, American Edition, Vol. LIII / January and April, 1871

by Various

In tracing the causes why these University Tests have existed so long, it has been impossible to avoid incidentally producing the reasons why they should endure no longer.

The test imposed at Cambridge, by requiring the graduate when he proceeds to his B.A. degree to declare himself a bonâ fide member of the Church of England, not only excludes the nonconformist from a voice in the senate, which body is the popular and ultimate regulator of the studies of the university, but it also denies to him a vote for the members representing the university in Parliament. This is the only constituency in which a religious belief is made to curtail the exercise of the franchise.

Headships and fellowships in colleges, as distinguished from the offices of tutor, lecturer, and dean, are sinecures involving no onerous duties, and not necessarily connected with the imparting of instruction of any kind, whether religious or secular. They are posts of honour and not of trust. Their occupants, no doubt, influence and control the course of study at their colleges, but they need not be and are not by their offices personally concerned in education. These posts, therefore, not only involve no clerical duty, they do not demand the exercise of those debateable functions which lie between the lay and clerical offices, such as the education of youth is supposed to imply. To use an illustration now rendered familiar to most by the practical working of the Education Act; the master and fellows of a college occupy the position of a school board, while the tutors and lecturers alone instruct. Lecturers in the several departments of study are, it is true, generally chosen from the body of fellows, but by no means necessarily so. Hence, there is no analogy between the test imposed on the clergy, and that which is taken by the heads and fellows of the colleges. The former is a pledge to perform definite functions for which the functionaries receive a definite stipend, the latter is a test applied to those who require service to be performed. The test as applied to these offices has become an unparalleled anomaly. It is the last remnant of the revengeful policy exercised by the Anglican upon the Puritan party, after these were driven from their short-lived supremacy.

Thus viewed, the tests at the universities are like the Needle rocks, which once were continuous with the neighbouring cliff, but are now become strange and fantastic through the isolation imposed upon them by the waves of the ever advancing ocean. As political change is as rapid and certain as geologic change is slow and sure, their bold position is an evidence not of their immunity from, but of their amenableness to the influence of the forces which play upon their bases.

The offices of tutor, dean, lecturer, &c., inasmuch as they are directly connected with the moral supervision and education of the undergraduates in all branches of study, including theology, stand in a somewhat different position with regard to tests. To those unacquainted with the universities, the distinction between these two classes of office is not obvious. The general impression obtains that these national institutions are training schools for the clergy of the Establishment, in which training all resident officials are concerned; but the members of the governing bodies themselves are quite aware of the difference pointed out. Unless this distinction could be made there would be no locus standi for the select committee of the House of Lords appointed for the purpose of inquiring into the best mode of giving effect to the following resolution of the house—

'That in any measure for enabling persons not members of the Church of England to hold offices to which they are not now eligible in the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Durham, and the colleges and halls in those universities, it is essential to provide by law proper safeguards for the maintenance of religious instruction and worship, and for the religious character of the education to be given therein.'

All the gentlemen who gave evidence before that committee, with the exception of the Rev. E. H. Perowne, who has the reputation of being the most uncompromising and indiscriminating advocate of tests, recognise this distinction; and all suggest that while fellowships, or some of them, be thrown open to all, a modified test be applied to the functional posts.

The pernicious principle that Government has a right to interfere between parents and their children in the regulation of the religious instruction of youth, has, no doubt, been often acted upon. Thus that Act of Uniformity, which is now the main prop of university tests, requires subscription not only from persons in holy orders and university officials, but also from schoolmasters in private as well as in public schools, and even from tutors in private families.

The recent legislation for the primary education of the country has, however, thrown a flood of light on the relations of education to religion, and of the State to both. It is scarcely conceivable that the Parliament which passed the Elementary Education Act of 1870, should retain a sectarian test as a safeguard to offices because they are posts of education. The Education Act was avowedly tentative and incomplete. It was a compromise, in which the representatives of old ideas obtained more recognition than they had anticipated. The bill will certainly be modified before many years are gone, and if so the modification is sure to be in the direction of eliminating the sectarian element from education. Yet there was great unanimity of opinion among the parties to the discussion in certain principles embodied in the Act. These principles were: 1. That the State might neither provide nor require definite religious instruction. 2. That where, owing to existing methods of denominational education, it was necessary for the State to make the various sects its allies to effect the common object of secular education, it should deal to all denominations even-handed justice. 3. That wherever the State interfered or was concerned with education, no child who was the recipient of the benefactions applied to instruction should be placed at any disadvantage on account of the religious belief of the parents of that child.

If the House of Lords should endeavour so to mutilate the University Tests bill as to substitute a test, however modified or limited in its action, in place of that imposed by the Act of Uniformity, it would ask the legislature to violate every one of the aforesaid principles, and thus to stultify itself. Such an attempt is certain to be successfully resisted. We had better not legislate at all than re-endorse a time dis-honoured practice.