Page:An Academic Sketch.djvu/28

 Rh circles, the proof of this relative weakness is supplied by the single fact that to reform our service-books, and to instruct our candidates for holy orders, we were driven to invoke the aid of foreigners. Bucer, wisest of them all, filled the Divinity Chair at Cambridge, and when he died Musculus, another foreigner, was recommended for it; Peter Martyr was Regius Professor in Oxford; Alasco, Fagius, and Ochino are well-known names of men who exercised in the Edwardian period their powerful influence upon ecclesiastical affairs, in aid of the national deficiencies.

The large relative share of Cambridge at this critical period was enhanced by the fact that there was a difference in the prevalent theological cast of the two Universities. Oxford was on the losing side; and perhaps the very ablest men among those she reared, such as Allen, Campion, Stapleton, and the rest, were ejected and suppressed. It might be said, without any gross perversion of historical truth, that in the sixteenth century the deepest and most vital religious influences within the two Universities respectively were addressed, at Oxford to the making of recusants, at Cambridge to the production of Zwinglians and Calvinists. Undoubtedly it was Cambridge that reared the various forms of Puritanism, which seems to have divided with Recusancy the warmer religious life of those days. She produced Whitaker, the champion of the more temperate Puritanism: she also produced Browne, the leader of the consistent and thorough-going Brownists. She claims likewise Travers and Cartwright, who stand between the two: and it is further characteristic of the