Page:A review of the state of the question respecting the admission of dissenters to the universities.djvu/45

43 removed, and the question therefore be brought to this point.

I have now gone through in detail the principal points necessary to be considered in connexion with the question at issue. I have done so, I am sure, with no unfair purpose; I trust with no prejudiced or uncandid feeling. It has been my object rather to pass the subject fully in review, and, by laying open its difficulties, to lead others to a consideration of them, than to advocate strongly any particular conclusion. I am aware that the difficulties above noticed will appear of very different magnitude to different persons, even among those who bestow upon them an equally fair and deliberate consideration. But I can hardly imagine that any person, whose mind is not strongly warped by prejudice, or inflamed by passion, can make so light of them, as to think the subject a fit one for popular declamation, party politics, and hasty and ignorant legislation.

That it has hitherto assumed this character has probably arisen from the manner in which it has been mixed up with an acknowledged grievance, for which it has been somewhat hastily assumed that the admission of Dissenters to the universities offered the most fitting, if not the only remedy: whereas, allowing that a remedy ought to be found, the proposed measure in reality supplies a very partial and insufficient one. It is obvious that I allude to the grievance of the privileges enjoyed