His argument on the Confession of Faith comes to precisely the same result. The Confession of Faith lays it down, that The Lord Jesus, as King and Head of his Church, hath therein appointed a government, in the hand of church officers, distinct from the civil magistrate.' This proposition-particularly the last member of it, his Grace vehemently attacks; declaring it to have no warrant in Scripture, and upbraiding the Free Church with their adherence to a dogma so extravagant and untenable. He forgets all the time, that he is on the one hand only proving that the Free Church are merely acting in conformity with the recognised standards of the Established Church of Scotland; and on the other, that he is laying his axe to the very root of those canons which every member of the Established Church of Scotland at this day professes to believe. His vehement denunciations of the Free Church for their misapplication of Scripture, are open to the same, or even more severe remark. We do not here mean to determine the question, -or even to discuss it,-whether the passages referred to do or do not bear out the general positions deduced from them. Neither do we at all mean to say that the Free Church leaders have not made too unsparing and sometimes injudicious use of the Scriptural authority on which these positions rest. But certainly it was to be expected, that the Duke would have been impartial in his censure; and as all and each of the passages in question are not merely those on which the Confession of Faith-professed by all members of the Established Church of Scotland-proceeds, but are similarly interpreted by most of the Reformed Churches of other countries, that he would have directed the terror of his beak and lightning of his eye' against the whole body of the heretical. The truth is, however, that of all this his Grace was not aware. He writes, either on his own first impressions, or at second hand; and assails principles which, true or false, are far too deeply founded and well fenced round, to be upset by a novice. In regard to the last subject referred to, we merely make one remark. His Grace imagines that, when a text or passage of Scripture is referred to in support of a particular proposition, there ought always to be found in it a distinct enunciation of the proposition itself; and, as he very generally finds nothing that amounts to the proposition, he concludes that the whole affair is a piece of extravagance. A little more acquaintance, however, with his subject would disclose to him, that all these propositions-not so much proved as illustrated by the citations in question- are the results of long, elaborate, and most closely-linked processes of logical deduction; arrived VOL. LXXXIX. NO. CLXXX. KK at by careful collation of scriptural authorities; and not proved, but only summed up in the dogma or sentiment of the writers, and held by them to be sanctioned by or implied in the quotation annexed. We quite agree with his Grace, that this mode of adducing Scripture proofs' should be used with great care and caution; because it inevitably leads, among the less informed, to a rash and presumptuous abuse of abstract passages, in their application of them to events of daily life to which they have no reference. But in canons of doctrine or faith, it is quite usual and appropriate; and we recommend to his Grace, before he again so hastily condemns, to study, in the writings of the great Reformers, those elaborate and anxious steps of reasoning on which these opinions depend. It is no part of our purpose, however, in this article, to enter on these more special points of disputation. We content ourselves with merely indicating, as we have now done, the direction in which it seems to us that his Grace has gone astray. He has enough of other self-constituted advisers to make it easy for him to fill up the sketch we have given. But, in parting with him for the present, we have no wish that our last words should be those of disparagement. His book breathes a noble spirit, generous, if presumptuous, and candid, if not profound. Its reception, too, we are persuaded, will not, in any degree, discourage him; though the rough handling he has met with may render him less hasty and more studious for the future; and we mistake if his genius is of that shallow kind which cannot improve even its errors, and turn them to account. He may be right in thinking that the principles of Church government, to which his attention has been so anxiously directed, are again about to agitate and convulse our social world. We cannot flatter him that the views he has thrown out form, in themselves, an important contribution towards the solution of the coming problem. But as illustrative of a system of Church government, which, along with its own history and that of the people among whom it is maintained, is very little understood in England,-we consider this little volume as a very creditable addition to our political literature; and we look on it not, we hope, in vain as an earnest that its author will, in his own person, render the Ducal name of Argyll once more dear to Scotland, by patriotic exertions for her benefit, and intelligent knowledge of her wants, — a service far more valuable than the lively but ill-digested theories which constitute the sum of his Examination of Presbytery. ART. VIII. 1. Dr. WHEWELL: On Cambridge Studies. London 1845. 2. A Letter to the Authors of the Suggestions for an Improvement of the Examination Statute.' By A COUNTRY SCHOOLMASTER. Oxford: 1848. 3. Remarks on Legal Education, with reference to the suggested Introduction of legal Studies into the University of Oxford. By T. HENRY HADDAN, M. A., Barrister-at-Law, Vinerian Law-Fellow, and late Fellow of Exeter College. MID the revolutions which have shaken thrones and overA turned dynasties, we have not entirely escaped. A revolutionary movement which neither the experience of past ages nor the caution of the present age authorised us to expect, has startled the tranquil waters of the Cam and Isis. Towards the close of last year, to the astonishment of those without, and the partial horror of some within her gates, the University of Cambridge herself pronounced against the system which she had so long maintained, in favour of one more liberal, and more wise, and in its spirit, we believe more ancient. The non-academic world is aware that, under the mysterious operations of such cabalistic words as Syndicates, Graces, Triposes, an important change of some sort has been introduced at Cambridge into the academical system of England. The change, translated into ordinary language, is in substance as follows:-In the first place, every candidate for the degree of bachelor of arts, in addition to the amount of mathematics and classics required for a degree at present, must attend the lectures of one or more of the professors of the moral or natural sciences, during one term at least, and must produce a certificate from the professor of having passed a satisfactory examination. In the second place, two new Honour Triposes are established, - one for the moral, the other for the natural sciences; the candidates for these honours being arranged in three classes, according to their aggregate merits in all the subjects, with particular marks of distinction in each class for eminent proficiency in particular subjects. The sister University is preparing to follow, though more slowly, and at a little distance. The Oxford scheme, which we are sorry to say has been as yet only partially accepted by convocation, was a little different in its details, but its principle and object were the same: each University proposing to retain the distinctive elements of its previous system, at the moment of enlarging them. Those who know the sentiments which the Edinburgh Review has always promulgated on this important subject, need not be told how heartily we rejoice in the realisation of a scheme of the principle of which we have been the constant advocates, and how sanguine must naturally be our hopes of the advantages which the proposed change appears to promise. The alteration looks a simple one, and is so. But it imports a recognition of the great fact, that in the present state of knowledge and of society, something more is required in a college education than mathematics and classics: and it admits, for the first time, the professors, by whose learning and abilities the university has hitherto been more adorned than aided, into their just influence in its system and its degrees. Hitherto, the University education of England has been, like the saints of popery, the idol and adoration of one class, the reproach and abhorrence of another. While the former have extolled it as the most perfect consummation of human teaching, the latter have denounced it as the most reckless consumption of time and the most shameless waste of intellect. The one class has expatiated on the uniformity and completeness of a system, which blends the discipline of the reason with the cultivation of the taste,-which lays its substratum in the rigid rules of an inflexible geometry or logic, and crowns the edifice with the gorgeous decoration of classical lore- which hardens, and braces, and enriches the mind by a combination of studies to which no rival scheme could be compared, and for which no substitute could be found. The other derides a course of instruction, which sends forth young men into the world, at the age of twenty-one or twenty-two, utterly and completely ignorant of every thing but Euclid and algebra or a little logic, a few Latin, and fewer Greek books; and, for the most part, with but a scant and ragged knowledge even of these. As usual, the truth lies between the zenith of eulogy and the nadir of disparagement. The advantages of a university education have been too highly praised, and too recklessly vituperated. Its benefits have not been so great, nor its shortcomings so monstrous, as the world has been called upon to believe. These great and proud establishments have done far less for the education of the youth of England than they might have done; but the majority of students whom they have trained, are neither barbarous ignoramuses nor contemptible duncessome of them, indeed, the most accomplished of men. Their common error was their exclusiveness. Meantime the manner in which both at Cambridge and Oxford, this their common error was followed out, was so different, that two such opposite courses could scarcely possibly be right; and the reformations now in progress are as much of an admission as generous censors will require, that they have both been wrong. The illiberality of one University was abundantly reciprocated by the illiberality of the other. We have seen high wranglers who could not for the life of them have construed the first chapter of St. John's Gospel: on the other hand, we have also gazed upon first class men who could not have worked a rule-of-three sum, and who would have been perplexed to explain how two sides of a triangle are together greater than the third. Beyond this there was little or no choice. The University of Cambridge, in senate house assembled, has resolved at length that the time was come when its circle of knowledge must be enlarged. It has declared that it is no longer fitting that it should limit its instruction to mathematics or even to classics and mathematics only. We may grant what is so often contended for, that there is no better discipline for the reasoning faculties, than the elements of geometry; and no better exercise for patient diligence, or more necessary introduction to some of the higher branches of natural philosophy, than mathematical demonstration and analysis:-that there is no language at once so precise and so copious, so exuberant in the diction of the most fertile imagination, or so minute in the shadowings of the most delicate subtlety, as the language of which the force was not exhausted by Demosthenes, nor the profundity fathomed by Aristotle, nor the refinement and beauty reached by Plato: and that -when every modern tongue has been learned, and every modern writer studied, from Milton and Shakspeare to Goethe, Schiller, and Scott- still men will find much to enchant and astonish them in that language in which Socrates chastised the sophists, and Demosthenes defied the Macedonian. If it were given to all the sons of men to rusticate in parochial competence or bucolic ease, to drink port wine and assist at quarter sessions, or to grow grey and oleaginous in colleges: - then we might witness with complacency the dedication of the first twenty years of life to this combination of the difficult and the delightful-Euclid and Euripides, Peacock and Plato, the Dynamics of Whewell and the Comedies of Aristophanes. But, alas! Art is long, and life is short. The men whom English fathers and mothers send up to Cambridge every year, want, some of them the capacity, and many the taste for this twofold labour. Unattracted by the ordinary degree, and incapable of mastering the requisites for an honourable degree, the majority of them sink into a slough of despond, whence they emerge into the unhonoured ranks of the 'pol.' Three years have taught them four books of Euclid and a smattering of mechanics, a very little Greek and Latin, and - |