' said Mr. Gladstone in reply, 'demands that it should be
allowed to consider the question for itself.... Indeed, while I believe
that the admission of dissenters without the breaking up of the
religious teaching and the government of the university would be a great
good, I am also of opinion that to give effect to that measure by
forcible intervention of parliament would be a great evil. Whether it is
an evil that must some day or other be encountered, the time has not
yet, I think, arrived for determining.' The letter concludes with a
remark of curious bearing upon the temper of that age. 'The very words,'
he says to Stanley, 'which you have let fall upon your paper--"Roman
catholics"--used in this connection, were enough to burn it through and
through, considering we have _a parliament which, were the measure of
1829 not law at this moment, would I think probably refuse to make it
law_.' There is no reason to think this an erroneous view. Perhaps it
would not be extravagant even to-day.

What Mr. Gladstone called 'the evil of parliamentary interference' did
not tarry, and on the report stage of the bill, a clause removing the
theological test at matriculation was carried (June 22) against the
government by ninety-one. The size of the majority and the diversified
material of which it was composed left the government no option but to
yield. 'Parliament having now unhappily determined to legislate upon the
subject,' Mr. Gladstone writes to the provost of Oriel, 'it seems to me,
I may add it seems to my colleagues, best for the interests of the
university that we should now make some endeavour to settle the whole
question and so preclude, if we can, any pretext for renewed agitation.'
'The basis of that settlement,' he went on in a formula which he
tenaciously reiterated to all his correspondents, and which is a
landmark in the long history of his dealing with the question, 'should
be that the whole teaching and governing function in the university and
in the colleges, halls, and private halls, should be retained, as now,
in the church of England, but that everything outside the governing and
teaching functions, whether in the way of degrees, honours, or
emoluments, should be left open.' The new clause he described as 'one of
those incomplete arrangements that seem to suit the practical habits of
this country, and which by taking the edge off a matter of complaint,
are often found virtually to dispose of it for a length o