their parent, the faculty of arts, though the latter always asserted and maintained its fundamental supremacy.
The faculties arose, by process of natural differentiation, out of the primitive university. Other constituents, foreign to its nature, were speedily grafted upon it. One of these extraneous elements was forced into it by the Roman Church, which in those days asserted with effect, that which it now asserts, happily without any effect in these realms, its right of censorship and control over all teaching. The local habitation of the university lay partly in the lands attached to the monastery of St. Geneviève, partly in the diocese of the Bishop of Paris; and he who would teach must have the license of the abbot, or of the bishop, as the nearest representative of the pope, so to do; which license was granted by the chancellors of these ecclesiastics.
Thus, if I am what archæologists call a "survival" of the primitive head and ruler of the university, your chancellor stands in the same relation to the papacy—and, with all respect for his grace, I think I may say that we both look terribly shrunken when compared with our great originals.
Not so is it with a second foreign element, which silently dropped into the soil of universities like the grain of mustard-seed in the parable; and, like that grain, grew into a tree in whose branches a whole aviary of fowls took shelter. That element is the element of endowment. It differed from the preceding, in its original design to serve as a prop to the young plant, not to be a parasite upon it. The charitable and the humane, blessed with wealth, were very early penetrated by the misery of the poor student. And the wise saw that intellectual ability is not so common, or so unimportant a gift, that it should be allowed to run to waste upon mere handicrafts and chares. The man who was a blessing to his contemporaries, but who so often has been converted into a curse, by the blind adherence of his posterity to the letter, rather than to the spirit, of his wishes—I mean the "pious founder"—gave money and lands, that the student who was rich in brain and poor in all else might be taken from the plough or from the stithy, and enabled to devote himself to the higher service of mankind; and built colleges and halls in which he might be not only housed and fed, but taught.
The colleges were very generally placed in strict subordination to the university by their founders; but, in many cases, their endowment, consisting of land, has undergone an "unearned increment," which has given these societies a continually-increasing weight and importance as against the unendowed, or fixedly-endowed university. In Pharaoh's dream, the seven lean kine eat up the seven fat ones. In the reality of historical fact, the fat colleges have eaten up the lean universities.
Even here in Aberdeen, though the causes at work may have been somewhat different, the effects have been similar; and you see how
