governing body, and by the two proctors, as representing the Masters of Arts collectively) had in any instance been abused; it being a truth so notorious, both in and out of the University, that we have rather taken it for granted than given it its due weight as the highest of all testimonies in favour of the existing system, that whatever disappointment there may have often been amongst the candidates for honours, the honesty and integrity of the award has never been questioned for a moment. These features, then, at all events, are not reproduced in the bill of 1854. Another pet idea of the Commissioners, which they may claim exclusively as their own—for very few of their own chosen witnesses in Oxford approved it, and those somewhat hesitatingly, and with awkward apologies—was that of unattached students, who were to be the great means of increasing the numbers, and new-leavening the morality of Oxford. Whether this wild project fell before the grave and loving Christian arguments of Dr Pusey,[2] the quiet irony of Mr Gordon,[3] or the bitter but amusing sarcasms of the _Quarterly Review_, it is certain that it has found no favour in the eyes of our present university reformers. The “independent monads” have vanished. So it has fared again, with that sweeping clause in the Commissioners’ Recommendations (32), that “all persons elected to Fellowships should be released from all restrictions on the tenure of their Fellowships arising from the obligation to enter into holy orders,” which, when viewed in connection with the abolition of all religious tests in the appointment of teachers, and the last-named provision for a large class of students who would have been as far as possible removed from religious influences, with their confessed longing to tread the forbidden ground of the admission of Dissenters, clearly showed their object to be the severance of the University as much as possible from the Church; the gradual withdrawal of the whole education of the place out of the Church’s hands—for the theological as well as other studies were to be “supervised” by the professors;[4]—and the future admission, not only to degrees, be it remembered, which is the only right openly claimed at present, but to the emoluments and the dignities of our old religious foundations, of men of any religion, or of no religion at all. It is true that even the small amount of change proposed in this direction by clause xxxiv. of the present measure, forces upon us unpleasant suspicions, and seems founded upon no better reason than that some Fellows of colleges in Oxford are impatient of the restrictions, or forgetful of the professed objects, under which and for which they were elected; still, practically, it is admitted it would not tend materially to secularise the tone of the colleges, or weaken the clerical element in the University generally.