[Footnote 2: Why do not these universal rational religionists found
colleges for themselves, and get an university established on a scale of
splendour commensurate with their liberality, so as to cut out Oxford,
with its antiquated notions, altogether? How very funny it would be! It
must be the absurdity of the idea that prevents them--it cannot be
stinginess as to the means. Fancy Oxford in the hands of the three
denominations! the under-graduates hauled up for cutting meeting!--a
Wesleyan proctor, delighting in black gowns, stopping by mistake a
Quaker Freshman, with a reproof for being in broad-brim instead of
academicals, and being answered with "Friend, I am not of thy
persuasion!" Then the dissenting D.D.s flocking to the university sermon
at Mount Pisgah Chapel, (late St. Mary's,) wherein all denominational
topics were to be carefully avoided, and the sharp look-out that would
be kept upon any preacher whose harangues savoured of bigotry! Then the
boat-races; fancy the Independents' boat bumping the Particular
Baptists', and the Quakers' colours--drab-and-all-drab--floating at the
head of the flag-staff! And as to "tufts"--that vile distinction which
independent M.P.s are so indignant at--why, if a dissenting
nobleman--even the seventh son of an Irish peer--were to be had for love
or money, what a price he would fetch in such an Utopia of
nonconformity! Nay, if they could get even a Nova Scotia baronet--a Sir
Anybody Anything--we know pretty well what a fuss they would make about
him. There is no such fawner on the aristocracy, if he has but a chance
of getting any thing out of them, as a _parvenu_ by birth, a liberal in
politics, and an Independent by "_religious persuasion_."
The great danger, I suppose, would be, lest some more than usually
nonconforming under-graduate should start a "connexion" of his own, and
proceed to argue that all the university authorities, heads of houses
and all, were under an awful delusion, and that it was a necessary
consequence of civil and religious liberty, that under-graduates should
elect their own tutors and proctors, and be governed on the voluntary
principle.]