' FREE THOUGHT IN OXFORD.
Iis a little important that the disgust which every right- minded minded man feels at the late vote of the Oxford congre- gation should not blind us as to the excuses that may be urged for Professor Jpwett's opponents. The conviction that the minority were right is quite compatible with a feeling that the majority were animated by some other motives than mere intellectual narrowness and blind pique. The disinclination of a self-governing body to endow a Professorial chair to which they do not appoint, more than accounts for the slender balance of three—which it is now known would have been only one, if two distinguished members of the Uni- versity had not beenrevented by accident from attending. Indeed it is rumoured,p and we hope truly, that the constitu- tional dissentients are already negotiating a compromise, by which Professor Jowett may be paid from an endowment kept under University control. Still, although this would reverse the position of parties, it would leave a strong minority who would sooner see the University benefited by labours for which it does not pay than just to a heterodox scholar. As this party is almost exclusively recruited from the Oxford clergy and their curates—excellent men, no doubt, but in no wise above the level of any other country town— and from the less distinguished members of the most ob- scure colleges, it derives the little importance which it does not owe to numbers, from the character and ability of its two eminent men—Dr. Hawkins and Dr. Pusey. The fact that Dr. Pusey has once voted for the endowment, when he thought it could be granted on favourable terms to the Uni- versity, shows that his religious scruples are not insurmount- able. But we are disposed to let their party have the full value of these two gentlemen's adhesion, and we confess frankly that we think it considerable. The Provost of Oriel has been honourably connected with the Liberal cause ; he is the old friend of Whately, Arnold, and Blanco White ; he stood by Bishop Hampden under attack ; and a generous respect for greatness has made him Mr. Gladstone's unswerving supporter at elections throughout the Chan- cellor's somewhat erratic career. Dr. Pusey's present Church views, no doubt, favour intolerance; but he cannot have for- gotten that he broke ground in literature with an admirable apology for German speculation ; that he has himself been persecuted for his opinions ; or that he has seen his best friends, one by one, driven out of the Church by a blind public clamour, as much as carried out of it by their con- victions. It must be almost as painful for these two gentle- men to reflect how they are supported, as to see by whom they are opposed. With them are the _Record, the English Churchman, and Lord Shaftesbury ; against them, almost without exception, the professoriate and the most eminent college tutors. It is right to do justice to that sincerity of conviction which leads men to isolate themselves from their old associations and friendships, and to stand in a crowd where they are more solitary than if they recorded their votes singly against unanimous opinion. No man can bid the " long farewell to worldly fame," which Dryden has so touchingly described, without a keen sense of isolation; and no gentleman can be supposed to wish that the battle of orthodoxy against free thought should be staked on a vulgar issue of money emolument. Let us be sure that the more generous of Professor Jowett's opponents are sufficiently punished by their own success, and by the continued spectacle of his unrequited labours. We need scarcely disclaim any sympathy with the party that claims an indiscriminate right for all men to sign what they like in one direction and think as they like in another. Free thought is not likely to be more respected if its par- tisans should tamper with the common rules of honour that bind gentlemen. But the case against the Regius Professor of Greek is so weak that nothing but the odium theologicum could for a moment make it tolerable in the eyes of common men. In his twenty years' work as a tutor in the most successful Oxford College, Mr. Jowett has not only com- manded the confidence of colleagues whose opinions are widely different from his own, but has exercised a wide in- fluence for good upon his pupils. Throughout that time Balliol has had its little knots of ultra-Evangeli a and Puseyites whose respective convictions have been un ected by their tutor's philosophy, while the moral reputa on of the college has stood deservedly high. The effect f the master among them was seen in the pupils' tone, not any dogmatical change. A few years ago Mr. Jowett pu had a series of dissertations on some of the Pauline Epi les, which seemed to a few of the anxiously orthodox to con the germ of unsound doctrines on the Atonement. Fortu- nately for these persons, the University statutes provided a ready means of bringing their opponent to the test, and no gentlemanly reserve deterred them from adopting it. A selec- tion was made of those of the Thirty-nineArlitleswhich it was sup posed would be most aliento Mr. Jowett's modes of thought, and he was called upon to sign these separately. It is scarcely necessary to comment on a system by which, if their adversaries were base or mad enough to adopt it, the leading Evangelicals of Oxford might be forced to forfeit their pre- ferment if they did not profess a special belief that the homilies on fasting in Lent and on the duty of passive obedience contained "a godly and wholesome doctrine and necessary for these times." It so happened that Mr. Jowett felt able to make the required subscription, and escaped the honours of martyrdom. He has therefore made a more solemn pro- fession of orthodox Christianity than any other clergyman in the kingdom ; his high character, and the freedom with which he expresses his thoughts, are sufficient pledges of his sincerity ; and even those who attacked Essays and .Reviews unsparingly, admitted that Mr. Jowett's article, in any other companionship, would have been unobjectionable, and almost praiseworthy. The practical question now at issue is whether he shall be paid for the professorial work he does, and so become independent of a college tutorship, or shall be per- petually condemned to eke out the nominal payment of his chair by working in a subordinate capacity. As tutor in a college he is bound to know his pupils personally ; as pro- fessor, he is only bound to lecture to them, and is restricted to a language and literature which are absolutely pre-Chris- tian. Simply, therefore, on grounds of expediency, it might be thought that Mr. Jowett's opponents would be glad to see him in a chair which demands nothing from its occupant except that he shall conform to the Liturgy, which binds him to deal with books rather than persons, and which must certainly force him to concentrate much of his attention on the safe subject of Greek scholarship. Unfortunately the so-called orthodox party are not only deaf to claims of justice, but suicidally blind to the path which common-sense would indicate. They insist on withholding the hire of the labourer, and do not see that they are condemning him to linger in the very fields of thought in which they dread his activity. But the question, of course, is ultimately one of justice. No one doubts that the university would gladly endow the Greek Professor if he held more popular views on theo- logy. The principle put forward is that although the State and the Church demand only conformity to the Liturgy, a hundred Oxford gentlemen have a right to enact a severer teat than has ever been dreamed of since we were a Protes- tant country, and to withhold the reward of secular labours from a teacher whom the Church acknowledges, and who has not only conformed, but subscribed collectively and separately to her articles. He has done nothing, said nothing, and written nothing for which he can be condemned, but the less educated section of society thinks that he has a heterodox diathesis, and that he may communicate the contagion through the medium of Greek plays. Therefore let him be starved out of his profession I The annals of Roman dela- tion and of the Spanish inquisition contain nothing in a small way so ridiculous. To condemn a scholar for a pro- clivity to think faultily is a triumph of the nineteenth cen- tury. Why is not the principle extended? Already an earnest undergraduate has complained in a printed letter to the University that his faith has been undermined by the subtle influence of a course of lectures on philosophy, and proposes that the offending Professor's salary be reduced to 401. a year, and only restored to him by instalments as " his religious convictions deepen." Surely the suggestion is not unreasonable if the present reyime in Oxford is to be perma- nent. We are far from following Mr. Jowett in his specula- tions, but his worst enemy cannot accuse him of having tried to build up faith on the negation of conscience and God. We cannot regard this matter as a slight one. The resi- dent Oxford graduates have the honour of the -University in their hands, and are bound, by the very condition of their existence, to be in the van of that nameless, numberless army which is fighting out the battle of truth on earth. Let them assure themselves that to proscribe inquiry in the interests of religion is only a tradition of the Judaism that stoned the prophets while it waited for the Lord. Rather less than a century ago the University statute against conventicles was enforced for the expulsion of some young followers of the Wesleys, whose crime was that they met to pray together. The blameless disciples of a movement that regenerated the Church of England were cast out from the learned and orthodox body which had trained • Bolingbroke and Gibbon. If the times since then are changed for the better—if the Church, rich in ancient thought and informed with a new spirit, has won back many who had left it to its allegiance, let it not mistake the secret of its success. It can never rival the Church of Rome in the authority which prescrip- tion confers, or compete in precise definitions with the sects that seek to narrow the narrow way of life. Its advantage really lies in that traditional liberality of tone which is half worldly wisdom and half Christian charity. Thoughtful men who look on truth as a matter of life and death, not of party triumph, are weary of the wisdom that assumes to be wiser than God, and of the creeds that are more rigid than Christianity, We come to our teachers for guidance, not for chains. Surely the faith that shrinks from declaring its own convictions to be final is truer, and deeper in spiritual_ humility, than the faith that would restrict prayer and praise within a sixteenth-century syllabus of theology. Surely Caiaphas, willing to build up peace on the sacrifice of one victim, was less wise in his generation—perhaps even less orthodox—than Gamaliel, counselling to leave the issue in God's hands. No doubt the persecution that punishes free thought with loss of fortune is even a smaller matter to us, relatively, than the death of a Galilean would seem to the Sanhedrim or to the Roman Proconsul. But it is a little difficult to define what is great and what is small in matters that affect religious liberty. If the sentence once go forth that genius, learning, and thought are anathema, and to be cast out of the Church, they will not go out alone ; the un- bought love of truth and the spirit of martyrdom will depart with them ; and a bare fabric of articles and endowments will be left to represent that living temple of which Christ is the corner-stone. The world is crying for light ; who are they who would quench the glory and bid us believe that God's presence ie in the cloud ?
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