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

by Various

The Elementary Education Act, while it thus indicated the nature of the reform required, also furnished the most urgent reason for the immediate adoption of that reform at the universities. If primary education ought to be the care of the State, secondary education is not less its duty. By secondary education we mean a higher education than that rudimentary training which is thought essential to all children; that is, a higher class education, not education for a higher class. That the child of a poor man who has shown himself capable of wider and higher culture by the readiness with which he has responded to the lower, should not be able to proceed to a higher class school, because of the poverty of his parents, would be even more deplorable than that dull ones should lack education altogether. The universities form the natural apex of the pyramid of national education. The nation can never rightly economise and utilise its intellect until every one of its children, capable of such culture, can pass freely up through all the grades of education to the very summit. If this is to be the case the capital must be rendered congruous with the column it should surmount. By reason of tests the national universities are rendered so incongruous with the rest of the structure that is in course of erection, that no cement could make them cohere. If by common consent we must eliminate sectarian religion from elementary education in the interests of the child whose father is so stolidly indifferent to the higher needs of that child that he must be compelled to send him to school; how absurd it is to provide that when he has grown into manhood and shown a capacity for the reception of the highest culture, he should be handed over for instruction to a body rendered exclusively sectarian by the retention of antiquated religious tests. The inauguration of a national scheme of education is an epoch in the history of the nation. It is a crisis in the history of the universities. On the present settlement of this question in some measure depends whether the ancient universities shall stand in the position of the Doric capitals which crown the columns and support the architrave of the classic temple, or lie like those same capitals after the earthquake has dashed them to the ground—the broken and isolated fragments of a former grandeur.

From a review of the past struggle, in which we have endeavoured to show how the march of events, the advance of ideas, and the change of position of parties, rendered the old line of defence formed by these tests, not only indefensible, but deserted by its defenders, we turn to examine the ground of the next battle-field.

The necessity of taking holy orders as a condition for holding or retaining offices and emoluments at the universities and their colleges is a test of the most stringent and pernicious character. Every argument against tests in the abstract, may be urged with double force against this clerical test. Every consideration of the welfare of nonconformists, of the universities, and of the nation, which has determined the abolition of the simple tests, is of greater force when applied to the complex test implied in the taking of holy orders.

Fully one-half of the fellowships of Oxford and Cambridge, and nearly two-thirds of the headships, can be enjoyed only by clergy of the Establishment. This clerical test is therefore a practical bar to Nonconformists of half the preferments of these wealthy national institutions; and the fact that all conscientious laymen are included under this academic ban certainly does not commend this test to exceptional retention. Colleges, where there is a certain minimum of clerical fellowships, are at the present moment compelled to elect inferior men when all their lay fellowships are filled. In colleges like Trinity and St. John's, Cambridge, where all must take orders at a certain date from their degrees, the more able and energetic men usually become absorbed in other pursuits and vacate their fellowships to serve in turn to younger men as means of defying the impecuniosity which notoriously dogs the early stages of a professional career; while the idlers as naturally become sinecure pluralists, because the dignity of the priest need not interfere with the fellow's ease. By this system the colleges are equally dishonoured by those whom they retain and those whom they reject. By this system the nation also suffers, by allowing the large revenues of national institutions to be squandered on cureless priests, which, by some such arrangement as is explained by Mr. Paley, might secure to literature and science the labours of our greatest scholars and ablest investigators. To this catalogue of ill effects may be added the damage done by the clerical test to the Church of England. Many years of university life is admitted to be the very worst preparation for parish work. As a rule, fellows manifest great repugnance to take upon themselves, in middle life, the duties involved in the acceptance of a college living; and the man who allows himself to drift first into holy orders and then into a college benefice, from sheer inanity, is not likely to bring much zeal to his work.

We are quite aware that a very different view of this result of clerical fellowships is taken by their advocates; and this brings us to the examination of those reasons which may be brought forward to show that the clerical test stands on a footing different from that of other tests. The advocates of clerical fellowships would state, first, that the clerical test was not imposed ab extra by the Imperial Legislature, but rested wholly and solely on the wills of the founders and donors of the emoluments and offices it guarded. They would argue, secondly, that by removing the tests from lay fellowships a sufficient number were thrown open to satisfy and reward all the Nonconformist scholars who were likely to seek education at the universities, and that by retaining the clerical fellowships a preponderance would be secured at the seats of learning in favour of Protestant Christianity, which preponderance is a desideratum with nine-tenths of the English people. They would show, thirdly, that these clerical fellowships induced men, having the reputation and acquirements of scholars, to enter, and thereby adorn and strengthen a Church which more than ever needs learned divines to meet scientific sceptics on their own ground.

All this may be true, but it is very little to the purpose. Whether the colleges, or any of them, were originally monastic institutions is a curious antiquarian question, but the requirement of holy orders and celibacy, from every member of the fraternity, in many instances, at least, originated in times when the recognition of a distinction between the regular and secular clergy was a part of the public opinion of the day. A community which accepted the theory that good works could be performed by a sacerdotal order which would benefit men's souls after death, quite irrespective of any effect which could be produced upon them during life, might look with complacency on fraternities freed from social ties, and consecrated to spiritual uses when these uses were not apparent. Nowadays, however, a collegiate priest is of all men least likely to give himself to works of supererogation. The duties of a fellow of a college and a priest without cure can be defined only as Bishop Blomfield once defined the functions of an archdeacon, namely, as archidiaconal. These duties may both once have been burdensome, but now the academic Issachar crouches down between them, and declares rest to be good and the land pleasant. The plain teaching of the clerical test is, not that we ought to follow the letter of the wills of the founders when it contravenes their spirit, but that well-meaning men can do little good, and may do much harm, by endeavouring to impose the ideas of one age on the customs and manners of a remotely future one.

It is a wild expectation that the maintenance of a Christian and Protestant ascendancy at the universities will establish oases in the midst of the barren desert of doubt, or clearings in the forest of Papist superstition, such as the several religious alarmists, according to their bent and temperament, would induce us to believe our country will soon become. Let those who delight in clothing bugbears with imaginary terrors speculate on the possibility of a Mussulman or a Parsee becoming an examiner for the theological degree, or a positivist becoming a professor of exegesis. A reasonable man will consider the conditions upon which such a thing could occur. Our nation must have forsaken a faith which has existed among us for a thousand years. Our legislature and our universities, both equally transcripts of the popular mind, must have forgotten their God. In such a case is it conceivable that a religion alike abandoned by a people which it has raised to power and prosperity, and by the Deity which promulgated it, should be preserved to our colleges by the operation of a test which is even now profaned by men who avow their readiness to swear et ceteras?

The great classical scholar Person, himself a sufferer under, and a protester against the clerical test, used to say that a fellow's life was like the lime-tree avenue at Trinity—a long walk with a church at the end of it. This was said in reference to Coton spire seen in the distance.

The present Bishop of Carlisle said in a sermon addressed to the University of Cambridge, 'We want men to enter the ministry of our Church who, if they went to the bar, would succeed at the bar.' There was a curious admission implied in these words, but to do Dean Goodwin justice, he was then speaking, not in defence of clerical fellowships, but to rouse the voluntary enthusiasm of the students he addressed.

That scholars are induced by the practical working of the system of clerical fellowships to take their places among the clergy of the Establishment cannot be denied, but the argument deducible from this, savours both of bigotry and worldliness. A clerical fellowship is in this view a skilfully-baited trap to catch a Church decoration. We have many instances to show that by placing upon learned men the badge of orthodoxy you do not make them defenders of the faith. Too often the false position of a man, thus entrapped, makes him cynically sceptical. Of such an one it may often be said, 'A little grain of conscience makes him sour,' and causes him—