Review-Wainewright on the Pursuits of Cambridge.

over; but wherever any thing depends upon critical interpretation or various readings, the original is referred to, and is compared with the versions, and with what commentators have written for its illustration. In this way, seven or eight hours in every week are occupied in the lecture-room, besides what the private preparation of the student requires. The fifth year is chiefly devoted to the reading of the New Testament, with the same scrupulous attention to every thing which can elucidate its meaning, without imposing any doctrinal interpretation; but as it is of the highest importance in the institution of a Christian minister, that he be thoroughly acquainted with this part of the sacred volume, the whole, or nearly the whole, is read over in the original.

We have purposely confined ourselves to a statement of the means employed to give the students educated in the institution in question, a critical knowledge of the Scriptures, since it is to this that Air. W.'s charge refers. And we now request the reader to turn back to the passage marked in italics in our quotation from him, and to say, if he ever saw a charge which more violently recoiled on the head of the accuser, than that which Mr. W. has so unadvisedly advanced. The fling at the Dissenters for their deficiency in oriental literature is the more strange, as we meet with the following passage at p. 76. "It is sometimes asked, what useful purpose is promoted by the professorships of Hebrew and Arabic established in both Universities, when no lectures are de livered upon the subject?* To this we reply, that though lectures are occasionally read on these topics, as is the case with the present Arabic professor at Cambridge, yet the design of these institutions is not regularly to teach the elements of the languages in question, which is best effected by private tuition, but to afford encouragement to the pursuit of an object which presents but few attractions, and to the critical examination of those oriental dialects, which would otherwise perhaps be speedily neglected, if not utterly lost." Besides the curious fact here stated, viz. that the present Arabic professor

"Though Hebrew is considered as a requisite qualification for a fellowship in some colleges, it does not constitute a regular and an essential part of collegiate literature." P. 74. Note.

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is sometimes read as a lecture to the under-graduates, the reasoning of this passage is worthy the attention of our readers. The title of these oriental scholars to the emoluments of their offices, arises from the unpopularity of oriental studies; of course they would forfeit this title by doing any thing to render them more easy or more attractive. The paradise of placemen is surely an appointment which not only allows inactivity but makes it a condition. Silent, however, as the operation of these oriental professorships-is, it is not the less powerful on that account; not the knowledge only of the oriental dialects, but the dialects themselves, Mr. W. assures us, would speedily be lost, did not a gentleman at Oxford and another at Cambridge receive salaries for doing nothing to diffuse them. Certainly nothing can equal the cogency of our author's reasoning, unless it be the accuracy of his style.

*

The deficiency in classical learning, which Mr. W. alleges as another source of the heresies of the Socinians, we are not inclined to deny; but we wonder that a Cambridge man should suppose it a necessary consequence, that if we had more learning we should have more orthodoxy. If the learning of Porson and his orthodoxy together could be transferred to us, we fear we should be still at a lamentable distance from Mr. W.'s standard. In Porson's days it had not become the fashion of the great scholars of Cambridge (for there is a fashion in keeping or laying down a conscience) to affect a political adherence to the church as by law established. On the other hand, there is a species of learning which we should be sorry to purchase by the renunciation of common sense, in applying it to the interpretation of the Scriptures. Of this sacrifice we might produce numberless examples, but while Bishop

"You may say that his religions creed resembled that of Dr. Samuel Clarke. You are at liberty to think so. Was Dr. Clarke not a Christian?"-Kidd's Imperfect Outline of the Life of Richard Porson, prefixed

to his Miscellaneous Tracts and Criticisms,

p. xxx. It may be interesting to our readers to be informed, on the authority of the same intimate friend, that Porson, though not the author of "Gregory Blunt's Letters," nor well pleased to have been suspected of it, thought the new doctrine of the Greek article, as applied to the support of the divinity of Christ, to be untenable.

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Review-Wainewright on the Pursuits of Cambridge.

Burgess lives and writes (may he long
continue to do both!) he will be him
self a host to prove, how little a man
may be the better Scripture critic for
his learning. Who could have be-
lieved that the editor of the Pentalogia
and the Miscellanea Critica, would pro-
pose, on the authority of Suidas, to
render ἐν μορφῇ Θεῖ ὑπάρχων “ pre-
existing in the nature of God?"
poach in Suidas for unlicens'd Greek!"

66

sible, it must still be borne in mind, that these things are the means and not the end-means to the discharge of the active duties of a laborious profession. A clergyman when he leaves college, may have a living in waiting for him, where, with a well-arranged cycle of other mens' sermons, (many probably purloined from the works of those lis"Isenters on whom he looks down) and Nares and Magee to furnish out a vi sitation philippic against the Unitarians, year after year may find him wholly devoted to his literary occupations, and not at all reproaching himself for being absorbed in them. A Dissenting minister who should thus sacrifice his professional duties to his taste, would be adinonished by the failing numbers and languishing zeal of his congregation, of the folly of forsaking his proper character to assume another incompatible with it. The ultimate destination of those under their care, can never be lost sight of by those entrusted with the academical instruction of our youth, without neglecting their duty and exposing themselves to much severer reflections than the sarcasms of universitymen. Whatever can be done, to render that portion of time which can be given to classical studies, either at school or afterwards, more efficacious, to encourage the diligence and emulation of the young, to secure the attainment of such a portion of knowledge in all their ministers, as may enable them to read and explain the Scriptures, and to provide for those who have more than ordinary talents for such pursuits, the means of qualifying themselves to be the teachers of the rising generation, the past and present conduct of the Dissenters give us reason to believe they will not neglect. With less than this they ought not to be contented-at more than this we should be sorry to see them aim. Indeed when we look at what Mr. W. states as the common course of classical reading at Cambridge, we do not see that it is above all hope of imitation, even by Dissenters. If a young man enters an academical institution, already able to read Homer and Horace, and continues five years there, pursuing his classical studies during the whole time, is it impossible for him, if he and his teachers are tolerably diligent, to read " the finest Plays of the Greek Tragedians, Plato's Dialogues, the Histories of Herodotus and Thucydides, Cicero's Philosophical Works,

Let not our readers, however, imagine that we mean, without further explanation, to surrender the classical learning of the Dissenters to all the sarcasms which Mr. W. and others are pleased to bestow upon it. Perhaps, even among ourselves, it has not always been duly considered what place it is possible to allot to classical studies, in the education of a minister (for of that only are we now speaking), without encroaching upon other things. A young man, who has devoted himself to the ministry, goes to the academy to prepare himself for the discharge of a practical and a laborious profession; and all his literary studies have a direct reference to this object. If among these studies there be some, which appear to have but little connexion either with the duties of the preacher or those of the expounder of Scripture, they find a place, because experience has shown, that next to a fervent piety and active benevolence (qualities in which we shall be surprised if even Mr. W. claim a superiority for Churchmen over Dissenters), nothing is more essential to the due influence of a pastor's character over the minds of his people, and his ability to take the lead among them in plans of general usefulness, than that he should possess a well-stored and well-cultivated understanding. Were this object lost sight of, in an age like the present, when the intellect of soeiety is upon the rise, the consequences must be very prejudicial, not only to the respectability of the ministerial character, but to the prosperity of the Dissent ing interest and to the influence of those principles of civil and religious liberty, which have been nurtured in the bosom of English nonconformity, and which still find among us their most steady advocates. But though these considerations to our minds satis. factorily prove the propriety of making a course of academical study, and especially of the study of the ancient languages, as ample and complete as pos

Review-Wainewright on the Pursuits of Cambridge.

and the two Treatises of Tacitus;" nay even to master the difficulties of Aristotle's Treatise of Poetry, and learn to call it by its proper name?*

Whatever humiliation it behoves the Socinian dissidents to feel, when they compare their own armour, xaλxέia, vvEaBoia, with the golden" panoply divine, in which have issued forth a Porson, a Parr, a Burney and a Wakefield," (p. 83, Note) it is clear that the attainments of Mr. W. himself are by no means of that colossal magnitude, beneath which the pigny scholarship of the Dissenters must peep about to seek itself a dishonourable grave. A man who takes upon him to school others for their deficiencies in Latin and Greek, should be very sure that he himself can write English. But did it ever befal a literary body before, to be defended by an advocate, who could print such a sentence, nay many such sentences, as the following? "Respecting Dr. Hartley's celebrated theory of solving the phenomena of the human mind by the agency of vibration and association, the former of these doctrines is certainly subject to great difficulty of actual proof," &c. (P. 64, Note.) Had such a sentence occurred in the theme of a student in the first half of his first session at a dissenting academy, we hardly think he could have escaped a rebuke for prefixing a "respecting" to that which nothing respected; and he would certainly have been informed that a theory of solving was a combination of English words, which "non Di, non homines, non concessere columnæ."

The short duration of dissenting academies is another circumstance on which Mr. W. dwells, and he contrasts it with complacency with the antiquity of universities. "Let any one direct his view to the seminaries projected at various times for the education of those who call themselves Rational Dissenters, (to say nothing of similar foundations for the Independents and Methodists) in which the defects and corruptions of the English universities were professed to be avoided, and the acquirements of learning to be ac

"The Poetics of Aristotle," as Mr. W. has it. Did he learn at Cambridge to speak of his Rhetorics?

+ The blows which Mr. W. aims at the Dissenters generally fall upon Priscian. The acquirement of learning is an act which

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complished with infinitely less toil and consumption of time; let him observe the success of these visionary attempts, and ask where are now the academies of Warrington, Daventry and Hackney, and what is the condition of the few which have escaped the wreck of their companions, and he will be less disposed to indulge in unreasonable declamations against those venerable and magnificent institutions which have endured the trial of so many ages, or to be led away by the chimerical dreams of the possibility of exemption from practical error.".

We were aware that it had been, and still is, an object with the Dissenters, to provide the means of giving education to their youth, without sending them to the universities. Were the studies pursued at these places as well adapted to secure the great objects of education, and their discipline as favourable to morals, as Mr. W. alleges them to be, still no Dissenter could be admitted to partake of these privileges, at Oxford, without trampling on the faith of his forefathers, nor at Cambridge, without joining in a worship, the form and invocations of which he must deem unscriptural. But at the time when the Dissenters formed those institutions, in whose decline Mr. W. triumphs, Oxford was still covered with the thick darkness of the scholastic ages, and not one of those reforms had been made, which have since placed her at least upon a footing of equality with Cambridge, in intellectual and moral discipline. Was it then an unpardonable presumption in the Dissenters, to have perceived, half a century earlier, the unfitness of university plans to the true objects of education, and while they preserved their youth from the evils of relaxed discipline, and temptations to dishonest conformity, to attempt to provide for them a course of study, more likely to qualify them for the duties of real life? That it was their object to abridge that needless infinity of toil to which young men would be exposed at an university, we never heard, and we require better evidence of the fact than the assertions of one who writes so much at random as

1

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Review-Wainewright on the Pursuits of Cambridge."

Mr. W. Dissenters have, we think, rather been prone to the opposite fault from that with which he charges them, and have suffered from attempting to make their institutions too much like the universities; and they have been respectable and prosperous, in proportion as they have known, and adhered to their own proper character. In magnificence it will readily be conceded that they are as much inferior to Cambridge, as Cambridge is to Oxford, but they are adapted to the wants and the means of those to whom they belong, and are the fruits of their generous and voluntary zeal. "Parva, sed apta mihi, sed nulli obnoxia."*

The Dissenters are as ready to acknowledge the errors which have caused the decline of their academical institutions, as Mr. W. to lay them to their charge. Yet some of the vicissitudes to which he alludes had no connexion with this cause. The removal o the academy from Daventry (for it still exists) was owing to the conscientious scruples which made its able and exemplary (would that the time were more remote when we might say its venerable!) Theological Tutor resign his charge. Before we can allow Mr. W. to exult over the errors which caused the decline of Warrington and Hackney, we must request him to answer us this question: Would either of our universities have been at this moment in existence, if they must have fallen, as soon as the opinion of the public pronounced, that their professors made sinecures of their offices, that their discipline was imperfect and relaxed, and their plans of study antiquated and barbarous? We are very sure that this question cannot be honestly answered in the affirmative; and into what then does their boasted perpetuity resolve itself, but into a power of holding out against public disapprobation, of slowly admitting the light which has long pervaded every place besides, of being the last strong-hold of exploded prejudices? It is the natural tendency of the independent revenues and exclusive privileges possessed by universities, to make them all this; and if Oxford is superior to Salamanca, it is less owing to any difference in her own constitution, than to that free and manly national spirit, of which she has

* Ariosto's inscription over his own

house.

been reluctantly compelled to inhale a portion-which has quickened her indolent circulation, and sweetened the acrid humours of her bigotry—a spirit which has been cherished chiefly by those who have never been either within her walls, or those of her sister University, and which she herself has done her utmost to extinguish.

To the imagination there is no doubt something imposing in an institution, whose identity is prolonged through so many reigns and centuries; and he who has walked up the High-street of Oxford, without feeling such emotions, may assure himself that he was not born to le an orator or a poet. The judgment, however, pronounces, that changes which destroy the chain of antiquarian associations, may be useful and even necessary. Founders bequeath their prejudiced and partial views along with their estates, and take upon them to legislate for future ages, of whose condition and wants they can have no conception: institutions which each successive age forms for itself will be adapted to the wants of each. In the mortality of the individual, Providence has taken a method to break the entail of error and prejudice; and frequent renovations seem necessary to produce a similar effect on public institutions. The boasted perpetuity of endowed and chartered bodies is generally only the immortality of a Struldbrug—a perpetuity of decrepitude, an eternity of dotage.

Academical establishments among the Dissenters have risen and fallen during the last fifty years, but the DISSENTING PRINCIPLE survives their vicissitudes, and re-appears with undiminished vigour. It is the same undying, though transmigrating spirit, that has successively animated them, which still lives in those, from which the present generation and the next must expect a supply of ministers, to carry on the work of recalling Christians to the undivided worship of the One True God; and if, as is reasonable to hope, some portion of original imperfection have been left behind, in every mortal vehicle which it has occupied, we have warrant for expecting that they will attain to a longer term than their predecessors. We are, however, far from saying to them, estote perpetua; the failure of some past applications of the pious wish might seem to have converted it into a phrase of evil omen, and ◄

ReviewWilson's Dissenting Churches.