Oxford, the intellectual and spiritual mother of so many famous
-heresies, has just given birth to a new and very strange aspiration for—orthodoxy we can scarcely say—but intellectual quiescence. It seems that at a large meeting of graduates and undergraduates in the rooms of a Fellow of Magdalen, where Mr. Mansel presided, and delivered an address an hour long, a Conservative society has been founded to counteract "the unsettling the minds of young men," a process to be effected, we conclude, by circulating Mr. Mangers proofs that you cannot know God, and therefore there is no use trying. The new party will never, we venture to predict, be able to handle Mr. Jowett, or Dr. Stanley, or Mr. Groldwin Smith, as their forerunners dealt with that very "unsettling" person Socrates ; but they will want a name, and as the most unsettling thing in the world is knowledge, we would suggest the adoption of one which has served the turn of as wise a Conservative party across the Atlantic. They should call themselves the Knownothings, and if they act conscien- tiously up to their calling nothing will ever unsettle them again.
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