The Sun.
London, England, 1860-04-18 00:00:00

has also the strength to defend. Thus one grand
destructive agency is paralysed. Time, indeed, is
the great destroyer—but his power, too, is greatly
neutralised by printing, by commerce, which lays
the foundations of friendship among nations, by
the ease of communication, which binds men to-
gether, by that diffusion of intelligence which
mul-
tiplies the natural guardians of civilisation. These
are perhaps not merely isolated phenomena.
Per-
haps they are but witnesses,andb
which
a few among
many witnesses, to the vast change hichhasbeen
wrought since the advent of our
turotorthdeitnruththe
that,stat
apart state
of nia nysnrreeeh relations to his Maker,
the fitful efforts of mankind must needs be worsted
from 13
erh
soundas andth e
in the conflict with chance and change; but that,
when by the dispensation of Christianity the order
of our moral nature was restored, when the rightful
King had once more taken his place upon his
throne, then, indeed, civilisation might come to
have a meaning and a vitality such as had before
been denied it. Then at length it had obtained the
key to all the mysteries of the nature of man, to
all the anomalies of its condition. Then it had
obtained the ground-plan of that nature in all
its fulness, which before had been known only
in remnants or in fragments—fragments of which,
even as now in the toppling remains of
some ancient church or castle—the true grandeur
and the ethereal beauty were even the more con-
spicuous because of the surrounding ruins—(ap-
plause)—but fragments still, and fragments only,
until, by the bringing of life and immortality to
light, the parts of our nature were reunited, its har-
mony was re-established, the riddle of life, hereto-
fore unsolved, was at length read as a discipline,
and so obtained its just interpretation. All that had
before seemed idle conflict, wasted energy, barren
effort, was seen to be but the preparation for a
glorious future ; and death itself, instead of extin-
guishing the last hopes of man, became the means
and the pledge of his perfection. (Applause.) It
was surely meet that a religious aiming at so much
on our behalf should, in its historical development,
provide an apparatus of subsidiary means for the
attainment of its noble end far beyond what man
in earlier days had dreamed of. To some of the
particular organs formed in this apparatus for car-
rying man upwards and onwards to the source of
his being, I have already adverted. Read in the
light of these ideas the appearance of the university
among the great institutions of Christian civilisa-
tion is a phenomenon of no common interest. Let
us see whether, itself among the historical results
of Christianity, it does not vindicate its origin, and
repay, so to speak, the debt of its birth, by the ser-
vice that it renders to the great work of human
cultivation. (Applause.) I do not enter into the
question from what source the university etymolo-
gically derives its name. At the very least, it is a
name most aptly symbolising the purpose for which
the thing itself exists. For the work of the uni-
versity as such covers the whole field of know-
ledge, human and divine ; the whole field of time,
in binding together successive generations as they
pass in the prosecution of their common destiny ; aid-
ing each to sow its proper seed and to reap its proper
harvest from what has been sown before ; storing up
into its own treasure-house the spoils of every new
venture in the domain of mental enterprise, and ever
binding the present to pay over to the future
an acknowledgment at least of the debt which
for itself it owes the past. If the work of
improvement in human society under Christian in-
fluences be a continuous and progressive work, then
we can well conceive why the king's daughter, fore-
shadowed in Holy Writ, has counted the university
among her handmaids. If, apart from what may be
the counsels of Providence as to ultimate success, it
lay essentially in the nature of Christianity that it
should aim at nothing less than the entire regene-
ration of human nature and society, such a concep-
tion as that of the university was surely her appro-
priate ally. Think as we will upon the movement
of man's life and the course of his destiny, there is a
fit association, and a nob!e and lofty harmony, be-
tween the greatest gift of the Almighty to our race
on the one hand, and the subordinate but momen-
tous ministries of those chief institutions of learn-
ing and education, the business of one among which
has gathered us to-day. (Applause.) The idea of the
university, as we find it historically presented to us
in the middle age, was to methodise, perpetuate, and
apply all knowledge which existed, and to adopt
and take up unto itself every new branch as it came
successively into existence. These various kinds of
knowledge were applied for the various uses of life,
such as the time apprehended them. But the great
truth was always held, and always kept in the centre
of the system, that Man himself is the crowning
wonder of creation ; that the study of his nature is
the noblest study that the world affords; and that
to his advancement and improvement all undertak-
ings, all professions, all arts, all knowledge, all in-
stitutions are subordinated, as means and instru-
ments to their end. The old and established prin-
ciple was that the university had its base in the
faculty of arts— Universitas fundata est in artibus.
It was not meant by this maxim that the faculty of
arts was to have precedence over all other faculties,
for this honour was naturally and justly accorded
to theology; both, we may suppose, because of the
dignity of its subject-matter, which well may place
it at the head of all human knowledge, and because
it was, so to speak, in possession of the ground, and
in the exercise of very powerful influence, at the
period when the less organised institutions for
teaching.began to develop themselves into their final
form of universities. But the university was founded
in the principle of universal culture, and the name
Arts was intended to embrace every description of
knowledge that, rising above mere handicraft, could
contribute to train the mind and faculties of man.
To say, then, that the university was founded in
arts was to assert the universality of its work. The
assertion was not less true, nor less far-sighted, be-
cause those who first made it may not have been
conscious of its comprehending more than the studies
of the trivium and quadrivium—which included
mg reatmr
ym, aarn,
dr
astronomy.hetoric,log i c,
This
catalogue arithmetic,
is
indeed
brief one, as compared with the countless branche a
branches
of modern study ; yet within its narrow bounds it
contains in principle, at the least, the philosophy of
speech, the philosophy of the mind, the mathema-
tical sciences, pure and mixed, and the fine arts.
It is both more easy and more rational, all circum-
stances taken into view, to admire the vastness of
the conception of the university, than to wonder
that it was at first but partially unfolded and ap-
plied. The sincerity, the sagacity, the energy of
purpose with which the old universities were de-
signed and organised may be discerned, as in other
ways, so by the progressive expression of their
studies. The Roman law, after remaining long
almost forgotten, became known anew to Europe ;
and, as it grew to be a study, the university pro-
vided for it with their faculty of laws ; and with
those degrees, principal and professors, which call
this day for my grateful appreciation. (Cheers.)
Again, when the final triumph of barbarism at Con-
stantinople compelled Greek learning to seek a home
in the west, provision began to be made forthwith in
universities fe7r its reception. I think my distin-
guished brother, if I may presume to call him so
(Professor Mansel), could tell us that one of the first
of these foundations was made in the very college at
Oxford which he himself adorns. (Applause.) And
the study of which Greek learning is the main and
most fruitful, as well as the most arduous part,
made its way under the well deserved name of
humanity, to the very head of the faculty of arts.
When in all physical science man, guided in no
small degree by our own illustrious Bacon, became
content (in Bacon's language) to acknowledge him-
self only the servant and interpreter of nature, and
to walk in the paths of patient observation, the
ground was laid for that faculty of medicine which
has attained in the University of Edinburgh to a
distinction destined I hope to be as long lived as it
is without don bt extraordinary. (Applause.) We can
hardly
expect that human institutions should, with•
out limit of time, retain the flexible and elastic tis

sues of their youth ; and universities in particular,
as they have grows old and great, have come to in-
terlace at many points with the interests and con-
cerns of that outer world which has but little sym-
pathy with their proper work ; or they might have
displayed at this day an organisation as complete,
relatively to the present state of knowledge and