Mr. Roundell and Mr. Story Maskelyne proposed to the House
of Commons yesterday week a resolution pledging the House to the principle of abolishing the clerical restrictions on the College fellowships and headships of Oxford and Cam- bridge, excepting in the case of the Dean of Christchurch, who is necessarily the Dean of a cathedral church. A petition to the same effect has been presented to the House of Lords, signed by a great majority of the resident teachers of Oxford, —that is to say, all the resident teachers and lecturers of six out of twenty Colleges demand this change ; a great ma- jority of the tutors and lecturers in fourteen out of the twenty ask for it ; while a minority only are in favour of it in two colleges of the twenty, and none at all are in favour of it in four Colleges more. That shows a very remarkable consensus of opinion among the active teachers of Oxford. In the House of Commons, Mr. Gladstone deprecated any attempt to influence the mind of a Commission appointed by both Houses of Parliament by a resolution passed in a single House alone. Mr. Bryce, in a very able speech, insisted on the assent of the Cambridge Commission, with two most able prelates at its head, to the proposal of Trinity Col- lege to liberate all the sixty Fellowships of that Col- lege from clerical restrictions ; and the Rev. Mr. Nelson, the junior Member for Mayo, in an eccentric but original speech, strongly supported the motion, expressing his inability to reverence all " pious founders," since some amongst them were men like " the sycophant Wolsey," detailing his experience of a Presbyterian Chair of "sacred rhetoric," which, he said, was a " sacred sham," and declaring that there was no " sacred" mode of analysing a Hebrew verb, nor any heresy likely to lurk in the middle voice in Greek. The resolution was with- drawn.
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