"_And that there never may be wanting a supply of persons duly qualified to serve God, both in Church and State_, let us pray for a blessing on all seminaries of sound learning and religious education, particularly the universities of this realm." A higher end to be attained, perhaps, than that of merely qualifying the student to "get on in the world." His university education is not so much to enable him to attain those eminent stations which are the prizes of ability and industry, as to fit him to adorn and fill worthily those stations when he has attained them. In truth, we think it is not desirable, any more than necessary, that a degree should be an essential opening to the bar, the profession of medicine, or even the Church. The university is injured by being too much regarded as a step to be got over with the view of reaching some ulterior end. We dwell on this point with the more interest, because we are satisfied that a still greater responsibility rests with the universities, to guard the fountains of knowledge pure and unsullied, in those days of professed knowledge, than in the so-called dark ages. Our day is rich in the knowledge of _facts_; there were many _truths_ influencing those men of the times we please to call dark, which we have ignored or forgotten. The general demand for information--for this knowledge of facts--has made it a marketable commodity, a subject of commercial speculation; consequently, a vast deal that is shallow and desultory, a vast deal, too, that is counterfeit and fraudulent, is abroad, made up for the market, and circulates among multitudes who are incapable of separating the grain from the chaff. It is therefore, we repeat, even more important that the sources of learning should be guarded from contamination, now that the antagonistic principles are the knowledge of truth and the subserviency to falsehood, than when, at the revival of literature, the struggle was between knowledge and ignorance. We would have the universities remember that it is their best policy as corporations, as well as a duty they owe to those great medieval spirits who planted them where they stand, to own a better principle than that which would lead them to succumb to what is called popular opinion--in other words, the floating fallacy of the day--and aim at producing the shallow party leaders and favourite writers of the passing moment. They cannot control the frothy surface and the deep under-current at the same time. It would be a sacrifice to expediency which, after all, would not serve their turn. There are institutions which will do that work, and which will beat them in the race. Let all such take their own course. "Let Gryll be Gryll, and have his hoggish kinde:" let Stinkomalee train the statesmen for the League and the jokers for _Punch_,--but Oxford and Cambridge have other rôles.