Nor, indeed, can the whole nation be otherwise than deeply concerned in this matter; and we are not surprised, at the interest which has been excited by the recent alterations at Cambridge, though not measures in themselves of any great importance. While we have contended for a higher ground on the part of the universities than that of merely finding such knowledge as is required by the popular taste, and happens to be most current in the market, and have called upon them to lead the public mind in these matters, we need hardly say that we must not be understood as failing to see the necessity of those institutions closely observing the shifting relations of our social equilibrium, and adapting their policy by judicious change, if need be, to the circumstances in which they find themselves. We might perhaps adduce the altered position of the Church with respect to the nation at large, as an instance of these changes. We have before hinted that the universities have, as we think, in some degree aimed at being too exclusively the training-schools of the clergy; and this circumstance, in our judgment, so far as England is concerned, has both narrowed the operations of the Church and the influence of the universities. The Church and European civilisation--the latter having grown up under the tutelage of the former--stand no longer in the relation of nurse and bantling, though Heaven forbid that they should ever be other than firm friends and allies! But the Church is no longer the exclusive teacher of the world: mankind are in a great measure taught by books. Viewing the clergy not in respect of their sacerdotal functions, but as the instructors of mankind, we find their office shared by a motley crowd of authors, pamphleteers, newspaper editors, magazine contributors, _quales nos vel Cluvienus_. It is incumbent, then, on the universities to consider how they may bring within the sphere of that control which they exercised in old times over the clergy, this mixed multitude of public instructors; how they may become not merely the schools of the clerical order, but also the nurseries of a future caste of literary men, who are to bear their part with that order in the coming development of human thought. THE COVENANTERS' NIGHT-HYMN. BY DELTA.