It would appear, from a letter in last Saturday's Times,
that we were mistaken in our view of the proposed limitation of the fellowship and scholarships recently offered for competition in Hertford College to members of the Established Church and all other Episcopal Churches of the same doctrinal basis. A " Fellow of Hertford College " assured the Times that the fellowship thus limited was not founded out of the £30,000 with which Hertford College was endowed,, and the trusts of which, as Mr. Mowbray assured the House of Commons,. were not, and could not become, fettered by any secret trust other than those which appeared on the face of the Bill, but were founded out of endowments accepted by the governing bodysince the passing of the Hertford College Act,— and, as we suppose, out of endowments specially impressed with a denominational trust. That alters the case entirely. We do not think it would do at all to prohibit for the future all sectarian limitations for academical purposes in every College of our Universities. That such trusts seldom work well, and are often likely to work se badly in the end as to need revision by the State, we believe ; but it would be a very strong and a very tyrannical measure, and one which, in the present divided state of religious opinion in England, no true liberal would approve, to render illegal the exclusive allotment to members of a special religious society of funds subscribed by that society. Denominational
education, freely allowed as it is in our primary schools at the expense of the subscribers, so long as no one is prohibited from reaping the general advantages of the secular education given through disinclination to take the sectarian teaching with it, cannot clearly, if offered on the same terms, be prohibited in the Colleges of our Universities.
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