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 Rh similar severance between the constituent parts of sound and thorough education. It may be, that the circumstances, and some even of the measures of our time, have not been propitious to the cultivation of one great branch of human knowledge, and have borne the marks of an inevitable reaction from undue clerical preponderance. Such reactions are essentially temporary; and will not prevent theology from recovering whatever ground may be due to it in virtue of its own proper force. I speak of theology as a science; and not of this theology or that. And it seems no violent paradox to say that, if there be a Creator of this universe, the knowledge which reverently deals with our relations to Him can hardly be other than the crown of human knowledge. It can, then, hardly fail to offer the richest reward, as well as to advance the most commanding claim, to the service and devotion not of stunted or of crippled intellects, but of the very flower of our youth.

Whether, as some think, the idea of an University in its comprehensive fulness has always been, or has not, an essentially Christian conception, it cannot, I suppose, be open to an historic doubt that the central idea of our ancient English Universities is an idea essentially Christian. It is nowhere more simply, and nowhere