a measure the nature of which was not announced, but one which will startle the people of this country when they see the consequences to which it will lead. My hon. and learned Friend said that my right hon. Friend the Member for the University of Oxford (Mr. Gathorne Hardy) rather noticed that his tone was not so conciliatory as usual. I own I did not notice it myself, but I wish to appeal both to my hon. and learned Friend and to my right hon. Friend at the head of the Government to say whether since this time last year anything has been urged by the opponents of the Bill which did not bear, or was not intended to bear, the character of conciliation for the purpose of settling this long-vexed question. I can appeal to my right hon. Friend whether he has not had some most eminent, most distinguished Members of both Universities making representations which must have convinced him that they would give First Lord of the Treasury seems to think poseuseless, are once repealed - and I am afraid my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer will not like the observation I am about to make you will have placed the first stepping-stone towards the disestablishment of the Church of England. My right hon. Friend did not like to be told last year that if you disestablished the Irish Church the same reasons would force you to disestablish the Welsh Church, and possibly the Church of England sooner or later. My right hon. Friend will not like the argument used by the Solicitor General as to the great changes to be effected, not for the purpose of giving Dissenters the benefit of University degrees, or the benefit of University scholarships, but for some idea of giving freedom to the Church, and thus securing better education than you have now. All I can say is that is not the freedom which the Church desires or ought to have. And when I see what is going-perhaps in one sense a reluctant, beon, when I hear what the people say of what is going on, I cannot but think that the last thing they would desire would be that the country should give such power to persons in authority as would enable them to alter your national faith or your national worship, be those men ever so distinguished. I, for one, say rather than pass such a clause as that I would willingly see all your former Bills passed into law; but I hold that neither the one nor the other is necessary if you will only give that which was the only thing the Dissenters hitherto demanded without taking away that which Churchmen had a right to require that the Government should still maintain. I say now, as I have said before, that now this measure has come into the hands of the Government they go much further than they ought to have done they altogether remove restric-religion, or even materially to alter those tions, the removal of which is not essential to the purposes of the Dissenters, but is most detrimental to the Church of England. I also say, as I have said before, that, instead of giving Churchmen that protection and security which the right hon. Gentleman engaged to do, you have kept the word of promise to the ear and broken it to the hope. You have not given them either security or protection, and if you pass the Bill in this shape you will thereby pass a measure not required for your own pur Mr. Spencer Walpole cause they do not approve the changes contemplated, but in another sense a willing support to the measure, if only you could have settled this question by giving to the Dissenters the degree and the Fellowship with this one safeguard, that you would not interfere, as you ought not to interfere, to impair or destroy the religious character of the teaching of the Universities. I believe I do not misrepresent the opinion of either one University or the other when I make that statement in my place; but this I must add, though they would have been content with a settlement of this question made under proper safeguards, there are some changes with which they never can be content. They never can consent— and here I am sure I speak their mind— to make a tabula rasa as it were of all their collegiate arrangements with respect to arrangements unless they can substitute some others equally good in their place. They will not consent in my humble judgment they ought not to consent— ever to divorce religion from education, as this Bill would undoubtedly do. Neither will they consent, nor can they consent, nor ought they to consent to leave a question which of all questions ought to be definite, fixed, and certain I mean the religious question-in a state of such ambiguity and uncertainty that it may lead to anything or to no thing, so that it will be terminated, | opinions and his own on this subject for the sake of avoiding all the religious there was a great gulf fixed. Following difficulties that arise out of it, either the order in which the Bill was drawn, in comparative indifference to religious truth or in the complete secularization of academical studies. That such should be the result even with your elementary schools the people of this country, as represented by Members on both sides of the House, have strongly manifested their determination not to allow. And do you think they will be more gratified if you are going to introduce such a system into those institutions which are to carry on the higher branches of study and education? I doubt it; but I feel so strongly that this would be the result of this Bill that I and those who think with me have no alternative left us except to try to get rid of this Bill, and leave the Government to introduce another in a far better shape. We never can consent to break up that wise combination of sound learning and religious education which has characterized these noble institutions for many a bygone age, and which has earned for them, and will earn for them, I firmly trust, for many ages to come the gratitude, the praise, the confidence, and the support of the people of England, whom I cannot characterize in a higher or juster manner than by saying that they are essentially a religious as well as an intellectual people. the right hon. Gentleman considered the case of the Universities first and the case of the Colleges next. As regarded the Universities, he stated that he was willing to concede much, and the Earl of Carnarvon said the same last year. He desired to point out to the right hon. Gentleman that what Liberals asked for was not a concession, but the acknowledgment of a right. There was a point in these discussions which was perpetually lost sight of by hon. Gentlemen opposite, and by their Friends, and that was this-that the Church was an intruder at the Universities. Now, he knew that he should be told, in the first place, that the Universities were ecclesiastical corporations. But that was a legal fallacy. They were nothing of the sort; they were lay corporations. Again, he should be told that the Universities had always been connected with the Church of England, and governed by the tests and declarations of the Established Church for the time being. That was an historical fallacy. It would be nearer the mark to say that previous to the Reformation precisely the opposite of this was the case. The early history of this country showed the Universities in the light of the strenuous defenders of civil and religious liberty. They sided with the barons against Henry III., and they defied the Pope and the Archbishops when they demanded the condemnation of Wickliffe. When the Jews were ex Amendment proposed, to leave out the word "now," and at the end of the Question to add the words " upon this day six months."-(Mr. Spencer Wal-pelled from England they were harboured pole.) LORD EDMOND FITZMAURICE said, in venturing to intrude himself on the attention of the House at this stage of the debate, he must urge that the fact of its being so short a time since he left the University, which on other occasions might induce him to be silent, might on this be his best excuse for saying a few words to the House. He had listened to the speech of the right hon. Gentleman who moved the rejection of this Bill (Mr. Spencer Walpole) with all that respect which was naturally due from him to one who had been so long a Member of that House, and who in it represented one of the Universities, the interests of which were at stake in this debate; but the more he listened the more did he feel that between the right hon. Gentleman's in Oxford. This, he would remind the House was in the 13th century, and now, in the 19th century, a Jewish Senior Wrangler could not be admitted to a Trinity Fellowship. When Henry VIII. established the cathedral of Christ Church he took especial pains to clearly enact that the Bishop was not to attempt to exercise any jurisdiction in the University. He did not think that a recent writer in The British Quarterly Review had at all overstated his case in saying that in the Middle ages Oxford was a refuge for all those who held speculative novelties in theology, science, and politics during times when the advocacy of those novelties was eminently dangerous elsewhere. Only after the Reformation did the fatal idea creep in of fastening the University in the strait waistcoat of orthodoxy. question of the origin of the Colleges. The Universities, he said, were originally State institutions; but the Colleges were the result of private benefactions, and, in this, he was right. They might be divided into two classes-the pre-Reformation and the post-Reformation endow The former were the work of Roman Catholics, the latter of Protestants in nearly all cases. Emmanuel College was, he believed, a Puritan foundation. If, then, they were to legislate by founders' wills, they must give back the greater part of these endowments to the Catholics. But were they prepared to do that? He hardly thought so. He was aware that it was sometimes argued that the present Church of England was the original Church of the country, and the Church of Rome the seceding Church. Assuming that the persons who used that argument were serious, it might be pointed out that it only showed that the Colleges founded before the Reformation were founded by Dissenters, and were none the less their property for all that. But it did not appear to him that the argument from founders' wills was a valid one in any case. He would wish, in this question, to start from a far broader principle than the interpretation of founders' wills. It was that after the lapse of a certain time the State had a right to interfere with the manner in which corporate property and endowments for charitable purposes were held. Upon this point he would quote an extract from Mr. Mill's writings were it not that he knew anything written by Mr. Mill would not be acceptable to hon. Gentlemen opposite. The present Lord Chancellor, however, to whose opinion they would, perhaps, listen, in his evidence before the Schools Inquiry Commission, said— King Edward weeded out the Catholics, Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice "I entertain very strong opinions about the dispositions people are allowed generally to make there ought to be a power of revision after the of their property by way of charity. I think time which has been specified (60 years), a power of revision of any disposition a person may choose to make of his property, because you do your of his great grandchildren; he cannot do it not allow a man to dispose of his property in fafor more than a life in being, and 21 years after that. That reasonable limit, he ought to be allowed, of course, for any fancy or whim he may have; but to allow a man to dispose for ever of a mass of property according to his crude notions of what he thinks best by way of charity for all time seems to me most unreasonable. that the sketch of the history of the University would lead them to think that the interests of true religion, of the arts, and of the sciences, were inseparably bound up with those of the Church. The presumed intention of the founders was defended by this Bill, because the University and College funds were not alienated from educational uses. Their bequests were made in an age when education was inseparable from religion. This was no longer the case. Again, these tests were futile. On this subject, he had no wish to intrude personal experience upon the attention of the House; at the same time he might venture to say, after a nearly five years' residence in the University of Cambridge, that he found nothing like that unanimity on religious topics which the right Two conditions, then, were to justify this interference-its utility should be fully shown, and what might be presumed to be the intention of the founder were he now alive should, if possible, be observed. Now, he held that the Bill under discussion kept these two conditions in sight. The expediency of throwing open these Colleges to the na-hon. Gentleman opposite supposed to tion might be supported on the following grounds:-That they had a monopoly of the highest education of the country; that it was to the general interest of the country that the greatest number of Englishmen should receive the benefit of this higher education; and that this was impossible as long as religious tests were in force, stigmatizing one-half of the nation with the badge of social and academical inferiority. When the right hon. Gentleman referred to the Colleges, that part of his speech which related to them reminded him of some verses of the Laureate's, called The Poet's Mind. In those verses he represented some singer addressing a person, whom by poetical licence, he supposed, he called a "dark-browed sophist;" and he told that much-abused person that he sincerely hoped he would keep out of the garden, because should he by any misfortune get in the flowers would die, the leaves would wither, the birds would cease to sing, and the fountain, which was supplied from a heavenly source, would shrink into the earth. In the same manner the right hon. Gentleman and his friends planted themselves at the doors of the Colleges, and said "Let no one enter here who is not acquainted with the elements of Anglican theology." They went on, moreover, to say that should such persons succeed in entering learning would perish, religion would die, the arts vanish away, and the sciences be nowhere to be seen. He would leave the House to judge whether they believed exist there. Mr. Goldwin Smith, a good authority on this matter, declared from his experience that those University Tests had altogether failed to secure the objects for which they had been framed. But he should be told there was an alternative scheme as regarded the Colleges. Lord Carnarvon had an alternative scheme, and the right hon. Gentleman the Member for the University of Cambridge (Mr. Spencer Walpole) had an alternative scheme; but he (Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice) confessed that he received anything in the shape of an alternative scheme with suspicion. They only heard of these so-called alternative schemes when a Bill was introduced to liberalize the Universities. They were the Mrs. Harris of University politics. It would be time enough to discuss alternative schemes when they were before the House embodied in Resolutions or in a Bill. Now, with respect to the subject of religious education at the Universities, they were often told that the necessary consequence of the Bill was to destroy the distinctive religious education of the Universities; but those who employed that argument had to prove, not the existence of a religious education, but of a religious education after the doctrines of the Church of England. At Cambridge none such existed; at Oxford there was an examination on the Thirty-nine Articles for the B.A. degree, and if the Bill before the House destroyed that examination he should be heartily glad of it. As regarded religious education generally he was not aware that any such existed at Oxford; at Cambridge it was represented by Paley's Evidences of Christianity, a book which he believed many orthodox persons regarded as a dangerous and wicked book. Whatever religious education could be said to be secured by penal attendance at chapel was protected by this Bill. It was, therefore, unfair to say that it interfered with the religious education of the University. In the remarks which he had addressed to the House he had attempted to show that the nation, in nationalizing the University, was reentering on its own lost property, and that in throwing open the Colleges it was acting on principles which all enlightened legislation should recognize, and that its action would in no way interfere with the interest of true religious education, for the good reason that there was little or no religious education to interfere with. He felt that he had done but insufficient justice to the cause which he had ventured to support; but he felt, too, that his cause had an intrinsic worth of its own which could not be injured by the inefficiency of its supporters. He asked whether, in this age, when the study of philosophy, law, history, and science was taking the place in University education formerly occupied by the dead languages, anybody believed that it was possible to bind men's minds by the bonds of orthodoxy and clerical supremacy? The conscience of the nation had long since condemned religious tests; it had ordered the belief in them to be classed with those beliefs of which Lord Ma- | caulay spoke, when he said that they had long since been abandoned by statesmen to aldermen, by aldermen to clergymen, by clergymen to old women, and by old women to Sir Harcourt Lees. Sir Harcourt Lees, whoever he was, abandoned them to that Boanerges of obstruction, Mr. Burgon, of Oriel College, and the Oxford country clergy, who played so memorable a part in an election some years ago; but he did not abandon them to the Members of this House, who, he (Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice) felt, would deal a deathblow to a system which, for so many years had been the bane of the Church of England, the English nation, and the English Universities. MR. RAIKES said, he trusted he might be permitted, as one interested in Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice that famous political debating society in which the last speaker had previously distinguished himself, to congratulate the Cambridge Union on having given another ornament to the House in the person of the noble Lord who had addressed it. He had no desire to prolong a controversy which had been conducted in a very conciliatory spirit, but admitted of no solution, as far as the basis of agitation on one side or of opposition on the other was concerned. Those who brought forward this measure might be truly of opinion that in doing so they were only carrying out Liberal principles; but they must concede to the other side of the House that they opposed it because they considered it to be an invasion of the rights of property, and an attempt to secularize property which had been devoted to religious purposes. Between the two there was a great gulf fixed, which he would not be rash enough to attempt to bridge; but, at all events, it was well worth considering how the Universities of this country might best be fitted to perform the task which had been and was still to be assigned to them. Was religion still to be taught in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge? There was a small party in the House, and a smaller one in the country, who thought that religion should not be taught at all, and with them he did not attempt to argue; but there was another party who looked upon religion in education as an extra-something that, in a ladies' school, would be paid for in addition, like "Shakespeare and the Musical Glasses." They were willing to allow theology to be studied by those members of a University who, either of their own accord or because their parents wished it, were addicted to the amiable weakness of that study; but they thought it should be in addition to, and not included in, the University curriculumalthough this, too, was an opinion which he believed was not largely held. The House had some reason to complain that it was left in doubt as to what was the actual position of the Government with regard to this question, for they had given no less than three different indications of the policy which they thought ought to be adopted in dealing with the religious education of the country. In the Endowed Schools Act they legislated on one principle, in the Elementary Education Bill they pro |