Oxford (England) -- History; University of Oxford -- History
loved to impress upon them, "as if you were to live for ever; so live as
if you were to die to-morrow." How little the young scholar, to whom
Oxford owes her first introduction to the Logic of Aristotle, cared for
the things of this world is shown by his contemptuous treatment of the
fees which the students paid to the most popular of their teachers. He
would throw down the money on the window-sill, and there burying it in
the dust which had accumulated, "dust to dust, ashes to ashes," he would
cry, celebrating its obsequies. And there the fee would lie till a
student in joke or earnest theft ran off with it. So for six years he
lectured in Arts. But even knowledge brought its troubles. The Old
Testament, which with the copy of the Decretals long formed his sole
library, frowned down upon a love of secular learning, from which Edmund
found it hard to wean himself. The call came at last. He was lecturing
one day in Mathematics, when the form of his dead mother appeared to
him. "My son," she seemed to say, "what art thou studying? What are
these strange diagrams over which thou porest so intently?"
She seized Edmund's right hand, and in the palm drew three circles,
within which she wrote the names of the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost.
"Be these thy diagrams henceforth, my son," she cried. And so directed,
the student devoted himself henceforth to Theology.
This story, Green observes, admirably illustrates the latent opposition
between the spirit of the University and the spirit of the Church. The
feudal and ecclesiastical order of the old mediæval world were both
alike threatened by the new training. Feudalism rested on local
isolation. The University was a protest against this isolation of man
from man. What the Church and Empire had both aimed at and both failed
in, the knitting of Christian nations together into a vast commonwealth,
the Universities of the time actually did.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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