A Year in Europe

by Walter W. Moore

CLARE COLLEGE AND KING'S CHAPEL, CAMBRIDGE.

The Two University Towns.

Oxford, farther west, is a somewhat larger city (about fifty-three thousand), with twenty-three colleges and about three thousand students, contains an unparalleled collection of picturesque academic buildings, and has some single features which are not surpassed anywhere, such as Magdalen (pronounced Maudlen) College, "the loveliest of all the homes of learning," Addison's Walk, The Broad Walk, and the "streamlike windings of that glorious street," to which Wordsworth devoted a sonnet. But Cambridge, too, has some features which cannot be paralleled, even in Oxford. For instance, Cambridge has, in Trinity, the largest college in England. It has, in the chapel of King's College, a building of marvellous beauty; Oxford cannot match it, nor can it be matched anywhere in England save by that "miracle of the world," the Chapel of Henry VII., in Westminster Abbey. The roll of Cambridge's alumni is illustrious to a degree, having such names as Bacon, Erasmus, Newton, Milton, Cromwell, Macaulay, Byron, Thackeray, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Harvey (discoverer of the circulation of the blood), Darwin, and many, many others equally well known.

Cambridge more Progressive than Oxford.

But the chief difference between Cambridge and Oxford is in the spirit and influence of the two upon the nation and the world, and here the glory of Cambridge excelleth. It used to be said in the fourteenth century, "What Oxford thinks to-day, England thinks to-morrow." But, as a matter of fact, it is Cambridge which has represented the true progress of England and her modern political and intellectual development, in such men as Milton and Cromwell, Isaac Newton and William Pitt, Darwin and Tennyson. Oxford has stood chiefly for the reactionary ideas of the High Church Anglicans.

The difference was sharply marked in the great testing time of the seventeenth century, when the East supported the Parliament, and the West supported the king. London and Cambridge were the centres of the Puritan strength, Oxford was the capital of Charles I. Cromwell's home was but a short distance from Cambridge, and he was a student at Sidney-Sussex College, where we had the pleasure of seeing his rooms, and the celebrated crayon portrait of him in the college hall. Roughly, we might say, Cambridge has stood for the Parliament and the people, Oxford for the king and the priests. At least, there has been more of the spirit of freedom, democracy and progress at the eastern university town than at the western.

The Presbyterian Element.

That the same difference still exists was indicated to us by a simple fact. When we inquired at Oxford for a Presbyterian church, the maid-servant said, "That is Protestant, isn't it?" She was evidently a Romanist, but it is likely that most of the Church of England people resident in Oxford never heard of Presbyterians, though our denomination is so much larger than theirs. Oxford is the head centre of Anglicanism, and there is no Presbyterian church there, though the Congregationalists and Wesleyans are represented. But at Cambridge we found a flourishing, though not yet a very large, church of our faith and order, under the pastoral care of a gifted and earnest man, the Rev. G. Johnston Ross, whose addresses at the Winona Conference, in Indiana, this summer, gave so much satisfaction. We had the pleasure of meeting him, and many of his people, at a pleasant garden party, to which all the Presbyterians of Cambridge were invited.

By the way, we saw a thing in that church which we had never seen before. When the minister read the Scripture lesson from the Old Testament, in the English Version, the two ladies in whose pew we were sitting opened the Hebrew Bible, and followed the reading in that, and, in like manner, when the New Testament lesson was read, they followed in the Greek text. To these two ladies whose learning has been recognized by the Universities of St. Andrews and Heidelberg, in the bestowment upon them of the degree of LL. D., and whose services to the cause of biblical learning, in the discovery and editing of the old Sinaitic Syriac manuscripts of the New Testament, have made them famous throughout the world of scholars, [1] we had a letter of introduction from a relative of theirs in Virginia, who is a kind friend of ours. And thus we had the pleasure of meeting at their table some of the choice spirits of the University, including the professors in Westminster College, which is the theological seminary of the Presbyterian Church in England.