or the theory that
Church and State are really identical, the Church being merely the State
in its educational and religious aspect and organisation. If Thomas
Arnold's moral earnestness and his generous spirit could not save this
theory from being chimerical, no better result was to be expected from
Coleridge.

THE ORIEL SCHOOL

It has often happened in the history of the English universities that a
given college has become, through its body of tutors and students,
through its common-room talk and literary work, the centre, for the
time, of a movement of thought which gives leadership to the college. In
this manner it has been customary to speak of the group of men who,
before the rise of the Oxford Movement, gathered at Oriel College, as
the Oriel School. Newman and Keble were both Oriel tutors. The Oriel men
were of distinctly liberal tendency. There were men of note among them.
There was Whately, Archbishop of Dublin after 1831, and Copleston, from
whom both Keble and Newman owned that they learned much. There was
Arnold, subsequently Headmaster of Rugby. There was Hampden, Professor
of Divinity after 1836. The school was called from its liberalism the
Noetic school. Whether this epithet contained more of satire or of
complacency it is difficult to say. These men arrested attention and
filled some of the older academic and ecclesiastical heads with alarm.
Without disrespect one may say that it is difficult now to understand
the commotion which they made. Arnold had a truly beautiful character.
What he might have done as Professor of Ecclesiastical History in Oxford
was never revealed, for he died in 1842. Whately, viewed as a noetic,
appears commonplace.

Perhaps the only one of the group upon whom we need dwell was Hampden.
In his Bampton Lectures of 1832, under the title of _The Scholastic
Philosophy considered in its Relation to Christian Theology_, he
assailed what had long been the very bulwark of traditionalism. His idea
was to show how the vast fabric of scholastic theology had grown up,
particularly what contributions had been made to it in the Middle Age.
The traditional dogma is a structure reared upon the logical terminology
of the patristic and mediaeval schools. It has little foundation in
Scripture and no response in the religious consciousness. We have here
the application, within set limits, of the thesis which Harnack in our
own time has applied in a universal way. Hampden's opponents were no