BRIBERY AND CORRUPTION AT OXFORD.
THE rage of the Ultra-Tory clique at Oxford, and of their London organ the Standard, at the refusal of the " Dons " to sanction the attacks on Dr. HAMPDEN, is very ludicrous. The Heads of Houses, with three vacant Bishoprics in prospect, were too sage and reflecting to run a tilt against Lord MELBOURNE'S Regius Professor. The Church (we quote the orthodox Standard) was 4' deserted by its ministers."
4‘ Corruption and bribery have been successful on the present occasion. Every nerve has been strained by the Ministry with a view to smother the ex- pression of the University's opinions in the ordinary way. The present vacancy of the Bishopric of Durham has presented inducements too strong to be resisted."
Lord Homan') was the Mephistopheles—the "devil on two sticks"—who lured the Oxford Doctors to perdition by the pro- mise of preferment. "The report is universal," says the Stan- dard's correspondent, " that promises to any amount have been made to those who might have influence. It is said that Lord HOLLAND received carte blanche for the purpose. This is very droll. We suppose that the Premier confided the management of the affair to Lord Bossism) because no time was to be lost, and his Lordship's opinion of Reverend Doctors is so well known that all delicacy and circumlocution would be con- sidered out of place in a negotiation carried on by him. Lord ROLLAND, we fancy, would go at once to the point ; and say to the Heads of Houses —" SPARKS, you see, is in extremis. Capital feeding in the FeasI—ninety-five livings in the gift of
the Bishop—fine provision for all your relatives, legitimate and ille- gitimate I There is not a man of you who votes against HAMPDEN but shall have a black mark against his name in my Book of the Church." This is the way to deal with Oxford Doctors, and se- cure their sanction to the appointment of Unitarian Professors of Divinity.
It is to be observed that the clergymen who, according to the champion of orthodoxy, have been bribed to vote in favour of Dr. HAMPDEN, are those to whom the education of perhaps half the ministers of the Church is confided. This makes their guilt still more heinous; for they set before all the unfledged parsons in the University an example of sacrificing their faith for prefer- ment, or the hopes of it. Dr. HAMPDEN is declared to be a Soci- nian ; yet his appointment to the chair of Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford is approved of by a majority of the Masters of Colleges; and his certificate will be taken by the Archbishops and Bishops as a guarantee of the orthodoxy of the young clergy- men brought up at the University. Titus, an education at Ox- ford, and the approval of the Regius Professor, is no longer surety against the introduction of Soeinians into the pulpits, and what is orse, the livings of the Established Church.
This, observe, is not our mode of viewing the recent pi occedings at Oxford. We do not vouch for the heterodoxy of HAMPDEN, or the bribery of embryo Bishops. The friends and champions of the Church—the preeminently faithful—are the men who ad- vance these charges ; and thus make manifest the hypocrisy of their pretensions to reverence of the Establishment, and let the world know how meanly they think in their secret souls of the character of its clergy. All that infidels and schismatics have urged against the Church, does not surpass in infinity the accu- sation made by its own dutiful children, in the bitterness of their bigotry and the overflowing of their spite. These internal corn- motions are symptomatic of approaching downfal. The house divided against itself cannot stand. The Legislature may per- haps be convinced ere long, that the application of funds now ab- sorbed by an Establishment whose clergy bandy about charges of corruption against each other, may be changed with advantage to the public for whose religious and moral instruction they were designed.
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