Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

I CONTINUED GROWTH OF SCIENTIFIC INTERPRETATION. ->--
H The centre and fortress of this vast system, and of the
reaction against the philosophy of the eighteenth century,
was the University of Oxford. Orthodoxy was its vaunt,
iKand a special exponent of its spirit and object of its admi-
^^ration was its member of Parliament, Mr. William Ewart
Gladstone, who, having begun his political career by a laboured
plea for the union of church and state, ended it by
h giving that union what is likely to be a death-blow. The
n mob at the circus of Constantinople in the days of the Byzantine
emperors was hardly more wildly orthodox than the
mob of students at this foremost seat of learning of the
Anglo-Saxon race during the middle decades of the nineteenth
century. The Moslem students of El Azhar are
hardly more intolerant now than these English students
were then. A curious proof of this had been displayed
just before the end of that period. The minister of the
United States at the court of St. James was then Edward
Everett. He was undoubtedly the most accomplished
scholar and one of the foremost statesmen that America had
produced ; his eloquence in early life had made him perhaps
the most admired of American preachers ; his classical
learning had at a later period made him Professor of Greek
at Harvard he had ; successfully edited the leading Amer-
ican review, and had taken a high place in American literature
; he had been ten years a member of Congress ; he had
been again and again elected Governor of Massachusetts ;
and in all these posts he had shown amply those qualities
which afterward made him President of Harvard, Secretary
of State of the United States, and a United States Senator.
His character and attainments were of the highest, and, as
he was then occupying the foremost place in the diplomatic
service of his country, he was invited to receive an appro-
iV Imt at that time minister to England, one of the most gifted women of her time,
'^H speaking, in her very interesting letters from England, of her journey to the seashore,
refers to Canterbury Cathedral, seen from her carriage windows, and which
she evidently did not take the trouble to enter, as "looking like a vast prison.''
So, too, about the same time, Thomas Jefferson, the American plenipotentiary in
France, a devoted lover of classical and Renaissance architecture, giving an account
of his journey to Paris, never refers to any of the beautiful cathedrals or
churches upon his route.