It is not that the university drew up a bad program, nor even that this scheme was badly carried out. That might be the case also; but the radical vice of the system was not that it was essentially incomplete in theory or faulty in practise, but that it was false. Its worst result was not poor scholars, but insincere and venal men. I believe Europe can not produce parallels to Oxford and Cambridge in opulence, buildings, libraries, professorships, scholarships, and all the external dignity and mechanical apparatus of learning. If there is an inferiority, it is in the persons, not in the places or their constitution. And here I can not help confessing that a desire to please the great, and bring them to the universities, causes a compliance with fashionable manners, a relaxation of discipline, and a connivance at ignorance and folly, which errors he confesses occasioned the English universities to be in less repute than they were formerly. The fashion of sending young men thither was even in some degree abated among that class who at the present day would be the most reluctant to omit it--the nobility. The useless and frivolous exercises required for the attainment of academic honors, and the relaxation of discipline, had by this time created a widespread and deeply felt contempt for the whole system of which they formed a part; and the indulgent but candid observer, who tries to dilute his censure with the truism that he could not have been placed anywhere in this sublunary world without discovering many evils, informs us that in his seven years' residence at the university he saw immorality, habitual drunkenness, idleness, ignorance and vanity openly and boastfully obtruding themselves on public view, and triumphing without control over the timidity of modest merit. It is under such conditions that the strong man of right intent rebukes the sloth and hypocrisy of his time. Very seldom, if ever, does he faintly guess the result of his protest. Jesus rebuked the iniquities and follies of Jerusalem, pleading for simple honesty, directness of speech and love of neighbors. In wrath the Pharisees made the usual double charge against Him--heresy and treason--and He was crucified.