It is the time of
liberty, and of intellectual attachments too fierce to last long.
Unluckily there are subjects more engrossing, and problems more
attractive, than politics, and science, art, and pure metaphysics.
The years of undergraduate life are those in which, to many men, the
enigmas of religion present themselves. They bring their boyish
faith into a place (if one may quote Pantagruel's voyage once more)
like the Isle of the Macraeones. On that mournful island were
confusedly heaped the ruins of altars, fanes, temples, shrines,
sacred obelisks, barrows of the dead, pyramids, and tombs. Through
the ruins wandered, now and again, the half-articulate words of the
Oracle, telling how Pan was dead. Oxford, like the Isle of the
Macraeones, is a lumber-room of ruinous philosophies, decrepit
religions, forlorn beliefs. The modern system of study takes the
pupil through all the philosophic and many of the religious systems
of belief, which, in the distant and the nearer past, have been
fashioned by men, and have sheltered men for a day. You are taught
to mark each system crumbling, to watch the rise of the new temple of
thought on its ruins, and to see that also perish, breached by
assaults from without or sapped by the slow approaches of Time. This
is not the place in which we can well discuss the merits of modern
University education. But no man can think of his own University
days, or look with sympathetic eyes at those who fill the old halls
and rooms, and not remember, with a twinge of the old pain, how
religious doubt insists on thrusting itself into the colleges.
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