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    may know , that Cambridge and Oxford are among the last places where any person wishing for education , and knowing what it is , would go to seek it . No one goes to Cambridge or Oxford for the education he expects to find there . The sons of the aristocracy go because their fathers

    went , and because it is gentlemanly to have been there . Those who are to be clergymen go , because it is very difficult otherwise to get into orders . Those who are to be barristers go , because they save two years of their apprenticeship by it , and because a fellowship is a considerable help at the outset of their career . No one else goes at all .

    One of the most important objects , certainly , with which Parliament or a Ministry could occupy itself , would be to make the Universities really places of education ; to clean out those sinks of the narrowest and most grovelling Church-of-Englandism , and convert them into reservoirs of sound learning and genuine spiritual culture . But is this what the Dissenters are striving for ? Nothing of the sort . The place remaining as it is , all they solicit is , permission to subject their children to its pernicious influences .

    Unless we would become a nation of mere tradesmen , endowed institutions of education must exist . There must be places where the teachers can afford to teach other things than those which parents ( who in nine cases out of ten , think only of qualifying their children to get on in life ) spontaneously call for . There must be places where those kind 8 of knowledge and culture , which have no obvious tendency to better

    the fortunesof the possessor , but solely to enlarge and exalt his moral and intellectual nature , shall be , as Dr . Chalmers expresses it , obtruded upon the public . And these places must be so constituted , that they shall be looked up to by the public ; that parents who are too narrowminded to see of themselves what is good , shall believe it to be good because it is there taught . In order that benefits which we estimate so

    highly may not be lost ; in order that the means may still be preserved of maintaining places of education , which shall not be the subservient slaves of the opinions and desires of the vulgar—we would have those means rescued from the hands of men who render the very idea of resisting the spirit of the age at once odious and contemptible—men who differ from their age chiefly by wanting its good points ; who combine the worldly spirit of the present times with the indolence of monks ,

    and the bigotry and sectarianism of two centuries ago . The first scholar in Great Britain , and the only clergyman of the Church of England who has acquired a European reputation , has just been ejected from his lectureship in the most liberal college of the most liberal of the two Universities , for asserting in a printed pamphlet , that the University does not give religious education ; an assertion which every member of the University knows to be true . And Dissenters would send their sons to be educated by these men ! Rather , if their sons had been already

    there , they ought to have indignantly withdrawn them . But the degrees of the Universities are of importance foT professional purposes . Be it so : there , then , lies the evil ; there apply your remedy . Abolish the monopoly of the Universities . Until public opinion shall have ripened for a reform in the places themselves , the law which should be enacted l > y Parliament is not one for admitting Dissenters to degrees , but one for rendering degrees no longer necessary for the enjoyment of any civil privileges . The title for exercising a profession

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    592 Notes on the Newspapers .

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Aug. 2, 1834, page 592, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2636/page/62/