that were not ministers, did stir the people up to resist the then supreme civil power? And was it not truly therefore said, that the Universities receiving their discipline from the authority of the pope, were the shops and operatories of the clergy? Though the competition of the papal and civil power be taken now away, yet the competition between the ecclesiastical and the civil power hath manifestly enough appeared very lately. But neither is this an upbraiding of an University (which is a corporation or body artificial), but of particular men, that desire to uphold the authority of a Church, as of a distinct thing from the Commonwealth. How would you have exclaimed, if, instead of recommending my _Leviathan_ to be taught in the Universities, I had recommended the erecting of a new and lay-university, wherein lay-men should have the reading of physics, mathematics, moral philosophy, and politics, as the clergy have now the sole teaching of divinity? Yet the thing would be profitable, and tend much to the polishing of man’s nature, without much public charge. There will need but one house, and the endowment of a few professions. And to make some learn the better, it would do very well that none should come thither sent by their parents, as to a trade to get their living by, but that it should be a place for such ingenuous men, as being free to dispose of their own time, love truth for itself. In the mean time divinity may go on in Oxford and Cambridge to furnish the pulpit with men to cry down the civil power, if they continue to do as they did. If I had, I say, made such a motion in my _Leviathan_ , though it would have offended the divines, yet it had been no injury. But it is an injury, you will say, to deny in general the utility of the ancient schools, and to deny that we have received from them our geometry. True, if I had not spoken distinctly of the schools of philosophy, and said expressly, that the geometricians passed not then under the name of philosophers; and that in the school of Plato (the best of the ancient philosophers) none were received that were not already in some measure geometricians. Euclid taught geometry; but I never heard of a sect of philosophers called Euclidians, or Alexandrians, or ranged with any of the other sects, as Peripatetics, Stoics, Academics, Epicureans, Pyrrhonians, &c. But what is this to the Universities of Christendom? Or why are we beholden for geometry to our universities, more than to Gresham College, or to private men in London, Paris, and other places, which never taught or learned it in a public school? For even those men that living in our Universities have most advanced the mathematics, attained their knowledge by other means than that of public lectures, where few auditors, and those of unequal proficiency, cannot make benefit by one and the same lesson. And the true use of public professors, especially in the mathematics, being to