Page:A review of the state of the question respecting the admission of dissenters to the universities.djvu/29

27 system, to establish colleges of their own, where they might train up their youthful students in severe and exact discipline—conduct their own domestic worship, and carry on their own course of religious instruction in concurrence with the general studies of the university, would not prefer doing so? It cannot but be that they would: and many persons will probably be disposed to say, "why should they not?" The answer is, that if religious indifference is likely to be the result of the other system, religious bigotry and fanaticism is the assured fruit of this. For what says the reviewer himself! He declares his opinion that such a measure "would contribute to entail a continuance of that sectarian bigotry and intolerance, which, in this country, at present equally disgraces the established and dissenting divisions of our common faith. The exclusive system of the present colleges would be imitated, justified, exacerbated, and perpetuated: and in the old and new colleges together, the university would become little else than the nurseries, and camps, and battle fields of a ferocious and contemptible polemic." Now, though there is much in the tone and spirit of this passage which I cannot adopt, and though I believe that even the blindness of misguided zeal in matters of religion is better than the deadly stupor of indifference, still the evils resulting from such a warfare of "secta-