a usurpation,
and were met with jealousy and resistance. When Colleges arose and became
the medium and instrument of University action, they did but confirm the
ascendency of the Faculty of Arts; and thus, even down to this day, in
those academical corporations which have more than others retained the
traces of their medieval origin,--I mean the Universities of Oxford and
Cambridge,--we hear little of Theology, Medicine, or Law, and almost
exclusively of Arts.

Now, considering the reasonable association, to which I have already
referred, which exists in our minds between Universities and the three
learned professions, here is a phenomenon which has to be contemplated for
its own sake and accounted for, as well as a circumstance enhancing the
significance and importance of the act in which we have been for some
weeks engaged; and I consider that I shall not be employing our time
unprofitably, if I am able to make a suggestion, which, while it
illustrates the fact, is able to explain the difficulty.

2.

Here I must go back, Gentlemen, a very great way, and ask you to review
the course of Civilization since the beginning of history. When we survey
the stream of human affairs for the last three thousand years, we find it
to run thus:--At first sight there is so much fluctuation, agitation,
ebbing and flowing, that we may despair to discern any law in its
movements, taking the earth as its bed, and mankind as its contents; but,
on looking more closely and attentively, we shall discern, in spite of the
heterogeneous materials and the various histories and fortunes which are
found in the race of man during the long period I have mentioned, a
certain formation amid the chaos,--one and one only,--and extending, though
not over the whole earth, yet through a very considerable portion of it.
Man is a social being and can hardly exist without society, and in matter
of fact societies have ever existed all over the habitable earth. The
greater part of these associations have been political or religious, and
have been comparatively limited in extent, and temporary. They have been
formed and dissolved by the force of accidents or by inevitable
circumstances; and, when we have enumerated them one by one, we have made
of them all that can be made. But there is one remarkable association
which attracts the attention of the philosopher, not political nor
religious, or at least only partially and not essentially such, which
began