Lord Harrowby and some of his friends have got up
a society for facilitating the training of Protestant clergymen at our Universi- ties, and have made it look very like an association to form a Church within the Church. Their object is to establish a Hall at Oxford, to be called Wycliffe Hall, and one at Cambridge, to be called Ridley Hall, for theological training. No student is to take up his residence in either Hall till he has got his degree, but if he takes his degree finally in a theological school, he may attend theological lectures at the Hall as soon as he begins to study for his final examination. But the peculiarity of the plan is that the leading men on the Councils of these Halls are to be bound over to Protestantism by peculiar tests,—tests within tests. They are not only to accept the Thirty-nine Articles, but they are to declare that they accept certain favourite Articles of the Protestant party amongst the Thirty-Nine, "in their plain and literal sense," — such Articles being, for instance, the Second and Thirty-first Articles (which concern the Atone- ment), the Eleventh (which concerns justification by faith), and the Sixth (concerning the inspiration of the Scriptures). Also these unhappy Councillors are to express especial approval of a passage in the Homily about justification, to this effect, that " faith doth not shut out repentance, hope, love, dread, and the fear of God, to be joined with faith in every man that is justified, but it shutteth them out from the office of justifying." If the Society succeeds, we submit that its principles will not shut out good-sense to be joined with the function of a theological teacher, but they will shut it out from the office of teaching. Tests grafted on tests, like the complicated cycles and epicycles of the Ptolemaic astronomy, are the worst possible omens for any sound Liberal theology.
