Page:A review of the state of the question respecting the admission of dissenters to the universities.djvu/40

38 the Reformation; very many of them in the reigns of Edward VI. and Elizabeth; and no inconsiderable number by those sovereigns themselves. It is needless to insist upon the object which the founders of these schools had in view in annexing such a condition to their foundations. No one can doubt that their intention was to secure in these situations persons, who, in connexion with an university education, had been brought up in the doctrines of Christianity as held by the Church of England. No one can doubt that if Edward VI., or Queen Elizabeth, in founding schools, had not felt that, by requiring the master to be a graduate in one of our universities, they obtained a perfect security against a Roman Catholic holding that situation, they would have adopted some other means for effecting the same end. It would surely be a grievous violation of the intention of these founders, if those institutions, which were meant by them to be the nurseries of sound religion, and of that pure Protestant faith, which the first of these sovereigns established, and the second zealously maintained, were to fall into the hands of Roman Catholics, Socinians, or any other of the dissenting sects.

The public attention has been of late much excited by a single instance, in which some charitable funds appear to have come into the possession of a class of religionists different from that for which they were originally designed. I mean the case