R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

234 R. W. Macanhad been until 1854, strictly Anglican. But after theUniversities Tests Act 1871, still more after the OxfordCommission of 1877, to maintain a strictly AnglicanFaculty of Theology, in a University open without confessionaltests to all comers, promised to be an increasinglydifficult proposition. The party in possessionwas not going to surrender at discretion, but was determinedto hold on as long as possible to privilege andendowment. They were, however, in the melancholyposition of fighting a losing campaign, even if victoriousfrom time to time in a rear-guard action. Thus, when theHonours School of Theology was instituted in 1869, althoughno confessional test was imposed on teachers muchless on candidates in the School, only Oxford priests ofthe Church of England could be appointed to examine.This anomaly was emphasised by the fact that examinationsin Divinity, obligatory on all members of theUniversity (subject to a conscience-clause), were conductedby the ordinary Public Examiners, whose theologicalcreed and competence were taken on trust. OurChurch had some more legitimate advantages secured toher in Oxford during the 'seventies by the 'New Foundation' of Keble and the re-endowment of Hertford College,both institutions being protected from the secular armof the Commission of 1877 by the fifty years' limit providedin the Act; nor has anyone been heard to murmur,even when they were further secured under the Universitiesof Oxford and Cambridge Act, 1923, by the substitutionof sixty years for fifty in the clause protectingtrusts of recent foundation. But just half-a-century beforethe latter Act a former Professor of Poetry, in 'anEssay towards a better apprehension of the Bible', hadbeen trying to persuade us that Literature and Dogmawere incompatibles; and the Vatican Decrees of 1871,with their reductio ad absurdum of ecclesiastical authority,