DR. STANLEY ON OXFORD.
SINCE John Henry Newman's voice has been silent in St. Mary's, probably no sermon ever produced so profound an effect on the motley Church audiences at Oxford—audiences com- posed partly of mere undergraduate sensoria, partly of groping and immature but restless and earnest thinkers, partly of victims to those singularly hard and narrow forms of sectional party feeling into which the professional and tutorial family circles of the University crystallize, and in part, but very small part indeed, of the large, comprehensive culture of judicial intellects,—as the farewell ser- mon preached last Advent Sunday in Christ Church by the new Dean of Westminster. Nor even to those who, like ourselves, have only read it is there any need to account for the singular force of that impression. Not only does it reflect with perfect clearness the unique influence of Dr. Stanley's individual character, —the intellectual sweetness of his moral force, and the pene- trative force of his intellectual serenity and sweetness,—but it expresses also with singular felicity the true spirit needed in a great national University, and never needed more at Oxford than at the present moment.
There is real spiritual grandeur in Dr. Stanley's vision of the ideal University, but also an intrinsic difficulty which he, perhaps, is the last man to appreciate adequately, in working it out into a reality. The true spirit of University life has seldom been deli- neated with more of that power which indicates special experience than in the following noble words :-
"Beyond the individual, beyond the college, there rises yet an ampler vision—Oxford as it might be, the seat not only of education, but of science, of learning, the well-spring of the thoughts that guide, and console, and elevate mankind! The place where Truth should be prized above every earthly consideration—above the claims of ambition or prefennent, above tho desire of standing well with our fellow-men, above oven the love of influence, or consistency, or power. A place where, for the sake of the love of Truth, much should be forgiven to those who have loved her much ; where they, of whom the world is not worthy, should find secure shelter from the strife of tongues and the clamour of ignorance ; where the splendour of our recollections and the simplicity of our objects should put to flight all petty party-spirit; where God's rare gifts of genius, and learning, and lofty character should, in whomsoever found, be welcomed and cherished as by a natural instinct; where year by year the landmarks of knowledge should be advanced by the students and teachers of this place, as they are in the far humbler Universities of Germany and Scotland; 'where great certainties should tako the place of little doubts ; where the subtleties and cobwebs of ingenious fancy should be swept away by the vigorous hand of genuine knowledge."
And well may Dr. Stanley ask "whether his words sound like mournful irony," when he draws such a picture as this in the heart of petty theological squabbles not even sufficiently intel- lectual to compare favourably with the domestic warfare of country town gossip, or to enlist even the generous ardour of awakening intellects in the strife. There is an irony in the contrast, and it opens the great question why it is so rare to find a Univer- sity actually ministering to that pure and unquenchable thirst for truth, which is at once so distinct from the scientific passion for theory, and from the ecclesiastical idolatry of dogma. Now and then, at scattered intervals, under the impulse either of a peculiarly con- stituted or a peculiarly circumstanced mind, we find a University genuinely fascinating and cultivating the opening intellects of young men without inspiring either the conceit of dogma, or the pride of blank and unattached intellectual neutrality. But neither in Germany nor in the great English Univer- sities is this ever anything more than a brilliant era which gleams and passes away. Nor is it due to the mere rare- ness of men of genius; for neither are men of genius really rare in large bodies of men, nor are the minds which exercise this peculiar influence in Universities by any means uniformly of that calibre. The peculiar difficulty of the case arises in the large needs of a great University for an exceedingly rare type of teacher,— that type which can profitably occupy itself with young men's questions at the age when most men have exhausted the impulse for reviewing moral and spiritual principles, and are prone to take their stand on such as they have got without further discussion, and push on to the practical work of life. This tendency is itself not only natural, but healthy in the immense majority of mankind, and instead of necessarily leading to dogmatism, simply ensures us against using the whole of life to prepare for living. But in eight prolessors, probably, out of every ten who have made pure knowledge their practical life, the practical in- stinct revenges itself for its neglect ; and the apparatus of moral and spiritual principles which, if merely used to pilot them through life, would have gradually got themselves amended, perfected, or laid aside as their value and their deficiencies became evident, become the hapless insignia of the only practical victories which their advocates are ever likely to win, till the smallest modification of them seems a greater impiety than the mutilation of the Hermes in Athens, or the desecration of a burial-ground in Eng- land. Compare for a moment the obviously enlarging, modify- ing, catholicizing effect, which political life has had upon the narrow Church principles of Mr. Gladstone with what all analogy teaches us, would have been the petrifying and con- stricting result of their habitual inculcation on generation after generation of youth at Oxford,—and we see at once the real root of the difficulty in the organized association between able men who have passed the time for directly discussing fundamental principles, with young men who are just entering that period of their life.
And whenever a powerful renovating influence passes over Oxford—or, indeed, any other great University—it is due to the influence of some man who, either from peculiar circumstances or peculiar intellectual constitution, can enter with greater power than the students, and equal zeal, into the natural phase of young mens' thought. Dr. Newnaan's almost magic influence at Oxford was due to the former cause. He was, during his residence, with all the cautious but steady gravitation of an intellect at once imaginative and frightened by its own doubts, unlearning the doctrine of private conviction, and learning that of intellectual submission ; and as
"The intellectual power through words and things Went sounding on its dim and perilous way,"
he naturally attracted towards him the whole host of younger in- tellects, which even where notnaturally in sympathy with his peculiar drift, were necessarily in sympathy with the investigating instinct which his change of faith stimulated into new life.
i3ut such an influence as this in a University is necessarily dangerous, even though it be for the time the most stirring and cultivating within the circle of ordinary human influence. The movement is good; but if the end of the movement be in wreck, disappointment., and collapse, the University at once trains men's faculties and inspires them with a paralyzing distrust thereof, which is infinitely worse than want of training. Dr. Stanley re- presents a different type of University influence equally educating, far more bracing. There is a certain rare personal faith in God and the Son of God which has the effect of fascinating the intellect with the deepest fundamental problenis of human life, so that they never lose their interest, and yet of preventing any dogmatic crystallization into petty formulm and personal standards of ortho- doxy, such as turn venerable theologians into malignant divines. We know few men in whom this type of personal faith is so deep and well marked as in Dr. Stanley, though instead of being a special type It ought surely to be the type of all cultivated men's faith. If we were intellectually in direct communion with the Spirit of Christ at all, there would be something simply ludicrous in that finality of orthodoxy which desires to shut out further knowledge on the express ground that our attained knowledge is already com- mensurate with His infinitude. No doubt, as Dr. Stanley finely said, there must be many moments when, in such a place as Ox- ford at least, men are tempted to cry out with the pathetic pas- sion of Savonarola, " Oh ! God, that thou would'st break these soar- ing wings," —and yet the mere temptation refutes itself, for it springs from the secret fear that man may soar above the truth of God. But Savonarola's impulse is infinitely higher than that of the dog- matic Oxford theologian who cries out, not that his own soaring wings may be broken (for he has lost them), but that no one else's may over grow.
Dr. Stanley and Dr. Wordsworth (both men whose inner faith is unquestionably, and it may be, equally deep) present admirable specimens of opposite spiritual moulds,—that which Universities need, but rarely indeed form, and that which they habitually form but never need, in their divines. Dr. Stanley, facing boldly the modern science, writes with equal truth and beauty :— " Science, criticism, philosophy, in their convergent forms, stand before us. But they stand before us in a new attitude. They are not hostile, as in the last century ; they are not contemptuous, they are not scorn- ful; they wish to be religious, they want to be Christian ; they will be friendly if we will but regard them as friends ; they give us counsel, if
we will but take it as counsel and not spurn it as an affront It is possible, no doubt, to see in the advance of critical knowledge a dreary winter of unbelief, which is to be the beginning of the end of the world, and shrivel up every particle of spiritual life. But it is also pos- sible, and more in conformity alike with the laws of nature and with the dictates of faith, to regard it as the keen bright frost which is not the end, but the beginning of life; which braces our nerves after the dissolving heats of summer and the dank fogs of autumn—which kills the noxious insects, and prepares all nature for the freshness and glory of spring."
Dr. Wordsworth meanwhile descants, as rumour tells us, to his audience at Westminster Abbey, on Dr. Stanley's enormity in thinking Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, any other than a most amiable and blessed woman for her treacherous carpentering in Sisera's forehead. There you see the opposite type of the two men, the one loving the spirit of the Bible, the other perhaps loving its spirit much, but certainly idolizing its letter more,—the one calling upon young Englishmen to reject no single avenue which Christ has opened to the heart,—the other begging them to blockade even the broadest, if it is inconsistent with a formula of biblical theory ;—the one treating Jael as a vindictive patriot, who sinned the worst of sins against the most divine of instincts,—the other as a Scriptural name, possessed of the ordinary Scriptural magic for interchanging the meaning of good and evil, right and wrong. It is the melancholy fate of most Universities to fall a prey either to such theological teachers as these, when they have any theology at all, or to blank unmoral scientific theo- rists, where they have not. It is as rare as it is delightful to find an intellect like Dr. Stanley's, which can keep itself open for new truth without ceasing to feed itself upon the old, which is not prepared to save Israel by decoying the new Science into its tent with the offer of "milk and butter in a lordly dish," and then following it up with the gift of such an iron loving-cup as that,—but which does for that very reason exert a far higher influence for the cause of God in awakening un- prejudiced intellects than the gnarled and sapless consciences of technical theologians can ever hope to apply.
Previous page
