e fulcrum from which the theological revival hoped to move
the Church. It was therefore a shock and a challenge of no light kind,
when not merely the proposal was made to abolish the matriculation
subscription with the express object of attracting Dissenters, and to
get Parliament to force the change on the University if the University
resisted, but the proposal itself was vindicated and enforced in a
pamphlet by Dr. Hampden by a definite and precise theory which stopped
not short of the position that all creeds and formularies--everything
which represented the authority of the teaching Church--however
incidentally and temporarily useful, were in their own nature the
inventions of a mistaken and corrupt philosophy, and invasions of
Christian liberty. This was cutting deep with a vengeance, though the
author of the theory seemed alone unable to see it. It went to the root
of the whole mutter; and if Dr. Hampden was right, there was neither
Church nor doctrine worth contending for, except as men contend about
the Newtonian or the undulatory theory of light.

No one ought now to affect, as some people used to affect at the time,
that the question was of secondary importance, and turned mainly on the
special fitness of the Thirty-nine Articles to be offered for the proof
of a young man's belief. It was a much more critical question. It was
really, however disguised, the question, asked then for the first time,
and since finally decided, whether Oxford was to continue to be a
school of the Church of England; and it also involved the wider
question, what part belief in definite religion should have in higher
education. It is speciously said that you have no right to forestall a
young man's inquiries and convictions by imposing on him in his early
years opinions which to him become prejudices. And if the world
consisted simply of individuals, entirely insulated and self-sufficing;
if men could be taught anything whatever, without presuming what is
believed by those who teach them; and if the attempt to exclude
religious prejudice did not necessarily, by the mere force of the
attempt, involve the creation of anti-religious prejudice, these
reasoners, who try in vain to get out of the conditions which hem them
in, might have more to say for themselves. To the men who had made such
an effort to restore a living confidence in the Church, the demand
implied giving up all that they had done and all that they hoped for. It
was not th