At Oxford the men have been thinking what
England was to think a few months later, and they have been thinking
with the passion and the energy of youth. The impulse to thought has
not, perhaps, very often been given by any mind or minds within the
college walls; it has come from without--from Italy, from France,
from London, from a country vicarage, perhaps, from the voice of a
wandering preacher. Whencesoever the leaven came, Oxford (being so
small, and in a way so homogeneous) has always fermented readily, and
promptly distributed the new forces, religious or intellectual,
throughout England.
It is characteristic of England that the exciting topics, the
questions that move the people most, have always been religious, or
deeply tinctured with religion. Conservative as Oxford is, the home
of "impossible causes," she has always given asylum to new doctrines,
to all the thoughts which comfortable people call "dangerous." We
have seen her agitated by Lollardism, which never quite died,
perhaps, till its eager protest against the sacerdotal ideal was
fused into the fire of the Reformation. Oxford was literally
devastated by that movement, and by the Catholic reaction, and then
was disturbed for a century and a half by the war of Puritanism, and
of Tory Anglicanism. The latter had scarcely had time to win the
victory, and to fall into a doze by her pipe of port, when
Evangelical religion came to vex all that was moderate, mature, and
fond of repose.
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