the universities at this moment! No! the real reason for our exclusion,
churchmen or not, is, because we are _poor_--because we cannot pay your
exorbitant fees, often, as in the case of bachelors of arts, exacted for
tuition which is never given, and residence which is not permitted--because
we could not support the extravagance which you not only permit, but
encourage--because by your own unblushing confession, it insures the
university 'the support of the aristocracy.'"

"But, on religious points, at least, you must abide by the statutes of the
university."

Strange argument, truly, to be urged literally by English Protestants in
possession of Roman Catholic bequests! If that be true in the letter,
as well as in the spirit, you should have given place long ago to the
Dominicans and the Franciscans. In the spirit it is true, and the Reformers
acted on it when they rightly converted the universities to the uses of the
new faith. They carried out the spirit of the founders' statutes by making
the universities as good as they could be, and letting them share in the
new light of the Elizabethan age. But was the sum of knowledge, human and
divine, perfected at the Reformation? Who gave the Reformers, or you, who
call yourselves their representatives, a right to say to the mind of man,
and to the teaching of God's Spirit, "Hitherto, and no farther"? Society
and mankind, the children of the Supreme, will not stop growing for your
dogmas--much less for your vested interests; and the righteous law of
mingled development and renovation, applied in the sixteenth century, must
be reapplied in the nineteenth; while the spirits of the founders, now
purged from the superstitions and ignorances of their age, shall smile from
heaven, and say, "So would we have had it, if we had lived in the great
nineteenth century, into which it has been your privilege to be born."