204

INTERCOMMUNION OF NATIONAL CHURCHES LECT. V.

tine, the strenuous efforts of Councils, the honest, pious endeavours of good men, Popes and Patriarchs, clergy and laity alike. If we may so dare to interpret history, we see that through all the elements of opposition the Christian world was to learn that the "faith once delivered" was to be preserved by the balance of more Communions than one; that when the National Churches were sufficiently organized, when the old idea of Visible Unity had played its appointed part, these Churches were to be a mutual support and protection, to supply what was deficient in one another from the basis of Intercommunion. The position to which every event has been gradually leading up, the position of National Church Independence freely and mutually recognised, with all the modifications of liturgy and rite and custom peculiar to each, a Union of all such Churches on the footing of the Primitive Creeds and the Primitive Councils, seems at last, by the force of events in the East and in the West, to be dawning upon the age.

What a future will then be in store for the world when this last act of the closing drama is announced! What force will Christendom then exert on the masses of heathendom! And, if aroused by the separate, yet harmonious action of the Churches, the rebel powers of Secularism join those of ignorant Paganism and modernised Mahometanism, and gather themselves up for one last struggle, what will this be but the expected sign that the end is near, and that the "stone cut out without hands" is at last about to "consume all these kingdoms,' and to "stand for ever"?

That there are signs abroad of a realization of some of these notions, which a very few years ago would have been thought perfectly Utopian, no one will deny. An

LECT. V. WAS TO SUPERSEDE PAPAL SUPREMACY.

205

age seldom fully perceives what it is actually producing, and this age is crowding vast events one upon another with a rapidity accorded to few of its predecessors. It is not beyond the province of history to take notice of such facts, History is, indeed, concerned with the past, but it reads the past in the light of the present. The connection between that past and this present is a fair subject for our consideration. At any rate we shall not be the worse for raising our eyes to an elevation which may shew us something on either side of the enclosed highway. If the view here given of the conflict of the Imperial and National principles, of the rise and growth of the Temporal Power of the Papacy, and its historical relations with Germany, France, and Italy, if the connection of this mighty past with the extraordinary changes now going on are any assistance towards the formation of worthy expectations for the future, a few minutes' attention will not have been bestowed in vain.

Dr. DöllingeR, in a recent work,† after explaining the difference between the German and English Universities (very much, of course, to the disadvantage of the latter), proceeds thus :—

“In mentioning these points I have no desire to find fault with the English Universities. On the contrary, I consider them excellent of their sort, and well adapted to supply what the nation demands from them. I would only point out that they are totally different from the German institutions of the same name-that, at any rate, they approach more nearly to the mediæval Universities, and have retained more medieval characteristics than the German Societies; and that these last correspond to the idea of a 'High School,' as it may and ought to be realised in the nineteenth century, far better than the English Universities. At the same time I will not conceal the fact that those renovated and improved editions of the old, and now unfortunately extinct, German bursaries, the Colleges of Oxford and

6

*This Lecture appeared in Blackwood's Magazine,' March, 1868. Universities Past and Present.' By J. J. Ignatius Döllinger, D.D., Professor of Ecclesiastical History, &c. Translated by C. E. C. R. Appleton, B.C.L. Rivingtons.

LECT. VI.

CONTRASTED WITH ENGLISH.

207

Cambridge, have many a time, as I observed their working on the spot, awakened in me feelings' of envy, and led me to long for the time when we might again have something of the kind; for I could plainly perceive that their effect was to make instruction take root in the mind and become a part of it, and that their influence extended beyond the mere communication of knowledge, to the ennobling elevation of life and character. I have often asked myself why we Germans are so slow to adopt an institution recommended alike by reason and experience-an institution which saves thousands of fathers and mothers from sleepless nights of anxiety and sorrow, which rescues many a young man from ruin or from life-long remorse.'

دو

Whether we agree with this great German authority or not, whether we accept his praise or his blame, or both, it may not be amiss to attempt to gather within the compass of a Lecture the main causes of a phenomenon which calls forth such remarkable words. How is it that while, according to this competent author's own account, the life of the German Universities is deficient in the important elements which he finds in ours, and is, after all, but a thing of yesterday—a fitful life of little more than a century a life, as other witnesses tell us, of wild, turbulent, ever-fluctuating excitement, which concentrates the intellectual life of the whole people very much within University walls, and certainly fails in diffusing it through the mass of upper-class society,* while the Universities of all other countries except Germany and England have fallen into

* Evidence of Dr. Perry before the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the Oxford and Cambridge Universities Education Bill. Special Report, &c., 1867.

208

ANTIQUITY AND NATIONALITY

LECT. VI.

decay, being either travestied by a ministerial bureaucracy as in France, or existing elsewhere in a state admitted by all to be beneath contempt,-how is it that, while all this is so on the Continent, Oxford and Cambridge are still, after surviving revolution upon revolution, and after presenting an unbroken line of continuity from the remotest period of our history, still "excellent of their sort, and well adapted to supply what the nation demands from them"? History must give us the answer. It is in considerations arising out of the history of these great institutions that we shall find what we are seeking. It is by a calm review of such considerations that those who have to deal with their reform or improvement will best fulfil their responsibilities.

Happily there is at hand as much material as could be expected in tracing back so ancient a history. No institution has ever had such antiquarians as those of whom Oxford boasts. There is little probability of any serious addition being made to their researches. Histories have been compiled from their materials, from the Statutes of the Realm, from the stray hints of mediæval chroniclers, and from the archives of Colleges, as well as from more modern biographies and local traditions; and this by every variety of writer. Later still we have had the elaborate Report of a Royal Commission, which has based many of its suggestions upon history; while, to balance its somewhat one-sided conclusions, we have the Report of the University Authorities, who were put on their defence by the Reformers of 1850. And now a new Blue-book on University questions* brings us up to the point from which

* Special Report, &c., 1867.