een absolutely right, our opponents were not
necessarily villains. In a word, we have learnt the Secret of Oxford.
All the time that we were fighting and fuming, the higher and subtler
influences of the place were moulding us, unconscious though we were, to
a more gracious ideal. We had really learnt to distinguish between
intellectual error and moral obliquity. We could differ from another on
every point of the political and theological compass, and yet in our
hearts acknowledge him to be the best of all good fellows. Without
surrendering a single conviction, we came to see the virtue of so
stating our beliefs as to persuade and propitiate, instead of offending
and alienating. We had attained to that temper which, in the sphere of
thought and opinion, is analogous to the crowning virtue of Christian
charity.

"Tell it--when _you_ go down."

Not long ago I was addressing a company of Oxford undergraduates, all
keenly alive to the interests and controversies of the present hour, all
devotedly loyal to the tradition of Oxford as each understood it, and
all with their eyes eagerly fixed on "the wistful limit of the world."
With such an audience it was inevitable to insist on the graces and
benedictions which Oxford can confer, and to dwell on Mr. Gladstone's
dogma that to call a man a "typically Oxford man" is to bestow the
highest possible praise.

But this was not all. Something more remained to be said. It was for a
speaker whose undergraduateship lay thirty years behind to state as
plainly as he could his own deepest obligation to the place which had
decided the course and complexion of his life. Wherever philosophical
insight is combined with literary genius and personal charm, one says
instinctively, "That man is, or ought to be, an Oxford man." Chiefest
among the great names which Oxford ought to claim but cannot is the name
of Edmund Burke; and the "Secret" on which we have been discoursing
seems to be conveyed with luminous precision in his description of the
ideal character:--"It is our business ... to bring the dispositions that
are lovely in private life into the service and conduct of the
commonwealth; so to be patriots as not to forget we are gentlemen; to
cultivate friendships and to incur enmities; to have both strong, but
both selected--in the one to be placable, in the other immovable."

Whoso has attained to that ideal has learnt the "Secret" of Oxford.

FOOTNOTES:

[17] The Rev. J. M. Le