accepted the post with much alacrity, believing that here was a new opportunity for usefulness and a promising instrument for extending the blessings of a liberal education to many persons who had hitherto been excluded from academic privileges. One of the

first proposals which he submitted to the Senate was to the effect that an acquaintance with some part of the New Testament in the original should be required of every candidate for a degree in Arts. For degrees in Law and Medicine he was not disposed to insist on this condition. But a degree in Arts, he contended, ought to certify that the holder had received a complete and liberal education; and a liberal education without the Scriptures must, in any Christian country, be a contradiction in terms. Of theoretic difficulties in the conduct of the examination he made very light.

"I am perfectly ready," he said, "to examine to-morrow in any Unitarian School in England, in presence of parents and masters. I will not put a question that shall offend, yet I will give such an examination as will bring out, or prove the absence of, Christian knowledge of the highest value. I speak as one who has been used to examine young men in the Scriptures for nearly twenty years, and I pledge myself to the perfect easiness of doing this. Our examinations, in fact, will carry their own security with them if our characters will not, and we should not and could not venture to proselytize even if we wished it. But this very circumstance of our having joined the London University at the risk of much odium from a large part of our profession would be a warrant for our entering into the spirit of the Charter with perfect sincerity."

"1

1 Letter to Bishop Otter, CLXIII.

SCRIPTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON 133

These views, however, were not accepted by his colleagues on the Senate, many of whom saw with greater clearness than he how difficult it would be to secure a succession of Arnolds as Scripture examiners, and how many promising and conscientious students might possibly be excluded from the University, if the religious examination were insisted on.

Accordingly, his proposal that every candidate for the degree of B.A. should be required to take up one of the Gospels or Epistles at his discretion was rejected. But in deference to his judgment and that of the minority who sympathized with him, a voluntary or supplementary examination was instituted in the Hebrew Text of the Old Testament, the Greek Text of the New Testament, and Scripture History and Evidences, and special prizes and certificates were offered to successful candidates. The regulations for this examination are still in force in the scheme of the London University and are an interesting survival testifying to Arnold's influence. But the annual number of candidates is small, and the certificates in this department of knowledge do not count in any way towards the attainment of a degree. Though keenly regretting that the principle for which he had contended did not obtain the approval of the Senate, Arnold yet continued for a time to serve as a member of that body, partly because he did not wish to censure even by implication those Bishops and clergy who still felt it their duty to remain, and partly in the hope of making the Scriptural examination as attractive and effective as possible, and perhaps of

so regulating its conditions that the Arts degree would be generally understood to be incomplete without it. When it afterwards became evident that neither the authorities of the affiliated Colleges, nor those of the University itself, shared his belief in the necessity of such an examination, or were disposed to regard it in any other light than as a purely voluntary exercise, he abandoned the contest, and in a sorrowful and dignified letter addressed to the Chancellor at the end of 1838, he finally resigned all connexion with the University.

The Oxford movement

CHAPTER VII

The Hampden controversy - Arnold's relation to the movement - His views as to the condition of the Church of England and of necessary reforms - Dean Church's estimate of Arnold's ecclesiastical position - The Broad Church Influence of outside interests on the life of the schoolmaster · The ideal teacher-Regius Professorship of Modern HistoryArnold's scheme of lectures-Its partial fulfilment - His early death-Conjectures as to what might have been had he livedMr. Forster and the Education Act-Testimonies of Dean Boyle and of the Times

It will easily be gathered from the foregoing pages that Arnold was likely to feel profoundly interested in the remarkable religious revival, which under the name of the Oxford movement made the fourth decade of this century so memorable in the history of the English Church. Indeed, any estimate of his character and career would be incomplete which did not include some reference to his share in that movement. Some of his old associates of the Oriel set, including Keble, Hurrell Froude, Pusey, Rose, Newman, and others, were led by the study of Church History and by a profound distrust of the current theology of the day, to assume a new position and to be recognized as par excellence the Anglican party in the English church. In 1827 Keble published his Christian Year, a volume of which Pusey afterwards said, that “it was the unknown dawn and harbinger of the reawakening of deeper truth." In 1833, Newman began the

1

publication of Tracts for the Times, with the avowed object of withstanding the liberalism of the day, and of finding a basis for the English church in Catholic antiquity, and strengthening the sacerdotal and sacramental elements in her teaching. In 1835, Pusey started the Library of the Fathers. The series of Tracts came to an end in 1841 with the publication of Tract 90, which was a laboured argument to prove that the articles of the Church of England admitted of a Catholic interpretation. This tract was censured by Bishops and by the Heads of Houses at Oxford, and was received with such a storm of indignation that the publication of the Tracts proceeded no further. The subsequent submission of Newman to the Roman Catholic Church in 1845 was the catastrophe of the movement.

The story of this movement has been told with singular candour, clearness, and dignity, and with touching pathos by John Henry Newman, the protagonist of the drama, in his Apologia pro vitâ suâ; and from another point of view, with no less fairness and scarcely less literary charm, in Dean Church's Oxford Movement. It must suffice here to refer to such of the incidents of that eventful time as specially interested Arnold and called forth his combative instincts. Dr. R. D. Hampden, who was public examiner in Oxford in 1831-1832, became Bampton lecturer in the following year, and in that capacity preached a course of lectures on the "Scholastic Philosophy considered in its relations to Christian

1 Apologia, pp. 150 and 195.