The Marquis of Salisbury, being under our constitution as powerful
as the House of Commons and the nation together, has determined that Nonconformists shall not have equal rights in the national Universities. On Thursday, when the University Tests' Bill came up for the second reading, he moved that it should be referred to a Select Committee instructed to add to it " safe- guards" against the unbelief which the Marquis considers " a force which, within our own generation, has been tremendous ;" and the unbelievers of the day, " the men, earnest, intellectual, honest, pure in the morality they have derived from the Christianity they repudiate, who seek with all the earnestness of a religious propaganda to overthrow the faith in which they have been brought up,"--and whom, therefore, his Lordship refuses to enlighten by a University education. No Select Committee can discover any " safeguards " except new tests, to which, indeed, Lord Salisbury points ; and as the object of the country is the abolition of tests, its labours must be as futile as they would if successful be injurious, the very object of the reform being to substitute for the secret conflict between faith and unbelief now raging in the Universities, in which Faith loses, an open battlefield, on which Faith may win. Lord Salisbury, however, is the House of Lords, and on a division the nation was defeated by the Peer, the numbers being 97 to 83.
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