It is characteristic of England that the exciting topics, the questions that move the people most, have always been religious, or deeply tinctured with religion. Conservative as Oxford is, the home of ‘impossible causes,’ she has always given asylum to new doctrines, to all the thoughts which comfortable people call ‘dangerous.’ We have seen her agitated by Lollardism, which never quite died, perhaps, till its eager protest against the sacerdotal ideal was fused into the fire of the Reformation. Oxford was literally devastated by that movement, and by the Catholic reaction, and then was disturbed for a century and a half by the war of Puritanism, and of Tory Anglicanism. The latter had scarcely had time to win the victory, and to fall into a doze by her pipe of port, when Evangelical religion came to vex all that was moderate, mature, and fond of repose. The revolutionary enthusiasm of Shelley’s time was comparatively feeble, because it had no connection with religion; or, at least, no connection with the religion to which our countrymen were accustomed. Between the era of the Revolution and our own day, two religious tempests and one secular storm of thought have swept over Oxford, and the University is at present, if one may say so, like a ship in a heavy swell, the sea looking much more tranquil than it really is. The Tractarian movement was, of course, the first of the religious disturbances to which we refer, and much the most powerful. It is curious to read about that movement in the _Apologia_, for example, of Cardinal Newman. On what singular topics men’s minds were bent! what queer survivals of the speculations of the Schools agitated them as they walked round Christ Church meadows! They enlightened each other on things transcendental, yet material, on matters unthinkable, and, properly speaking, unspeakable. It is as if they ‘spoke with tongues,’ which had a meaning then, and for them, but which to us, some forty years later, seem as meaningless as the inscriptions of Easter Island. [Picture: Old Episcopal Palace. From a Drawing by R. Kent Thomas]