But of all the University buildings the most beautiful is St. Mary's Church, where the University sermons are preached, and from the pulpit of which, in the course of successive generations and successive controversies, a changeful and often heady current of theology has flowed. There preached Newman, Pusey, and Manning; there preached Hampden, Stanley, and the authors of "Essays and Reviews."
University College. St. Mary's Church. Queen's College.]
Oxford and Cambridge were not at first Universities of Colleges. The Colleges were after-growths which for a time absorbed the University. The University of Oxford was born in the twelfth century, fully a century before the foundation of the first College. To recall the Oxford of the thirteenth century, one must bid vanish all the buildings which now meet our eyes, except yonder grim castle to the west of the city, and the stern tower of St. Michael's Church, at once the bell tower of the Church and a defence of the city gate facing the dangerous north. The man-at-arms from the castle, the warder from the gate, looks down upon a city of five or six thousand inhabitants, huddled for protection under the castle, and within those walls of which a fine remnant is seen bounding the domain of New College. In this city there is a concourse of students brought together to hear a body of teachers who have been led, we know not how, to open their mart of knowledge here. Printing not having been invented, and books being scarce, the fountain of knowledge is the lecture-room of the professor. It is the age of an intellectual revival so remarkable as to be called the Mediæval Renaissance. After the migrations and convulsions, by which the world was cast in a new mould, ensues a reign of comparative peace and settled government, under which the desire of knowledge has been reawakened. Universities have been coming out all over Europe like stars in the night; Paris, famous for theology and philosophy, perhaps being the brightest of the constellation, while Bologna was famed for law and Salerno for medicine. It was probably in the reign of Henry I. that the company of teachers settled at Oxford, and before the end of the thirteenth century students had collected to a number which fable exaggerates to thirty thousand, but which was really large enough to crowd the little city and even the bastions of its walls. A light had shone on youths who sat in the shadow of feudal servitude. There is no more romantic period in the history of human intellect than the thirteenth century.