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the repetition by a popish government of that violation of Protestant liberty and integrity, which, when attempted by a popish king, was successfully resisted by the illustrious body, to whom the insult was offered, the University of Oxford? If the Lady Margaret of Richmond's Reader in Divinity does not afford a refuge, parents must look to the sister University; till the pontifical priesthood in Ireland, ordering their Slave, and he his, shall think fit to offer the same indignity there. The perhaps inevitable professor of divinity, who has, indeed, sung a real, but not an open or professed, recantation; (for ambiguity in some of his expressions is the extreme of his admissions,) seems in some instances to have fallen into error, more from the giddiness inspired by newly acquired erudition, before he understood how to manage it, than from perversity of intellect or will. But had the retractation been more definite and complete, still the sincerity must remain at a considerable distance from moral certainty; and the softening proceess, so prominent in the application of papal logic, would supply ample means of defending, and maintaining, what is fundamentally both erroneous and noxious.[1] Let
- ↑ One of the first universities in the world certainly presents no very dignified aspect to its own country, in leaving the supposition not absolutely irrational that the Royal professor of theology in it might be corrected, not only in his conclusions, but in the logic which conducts him to them, by the more intelligent of the young academics who attend his lectures.
