have contrived some plan of impotent resistance to the
college authorities, or some plot of petty and vexatious annoyance, in
order to give vent to their mortification, when such silly resistance
has been proved to be ineffectual. Wishing for the screen or protection
of numbers, they will try to persuade their companions, that they will
be wanting in manly spirit, or in social feeling, if they refuse to join
them. And is there, after all, any thing so very _spirited_, any thing
of high-minded and noble daring in behaviour, which seeks to screen
itself by concealment and subterfuge, and which, if detected, braves,
not any personal danger or suffering, but merely the terrors of an
imposition? If the offence is so aggravated as to entail the heavier
penalty, rustication, or expulsion, such punishment inflicts, indeed,
severe grief upon the parents and friends of the offender; but he
himself, with the short-sightedness of folly, perhaps almost enjoys the
idleness and the freedom from academical restraint, to which rustication
consigns him. A young Oxonian is apt to feel very indignant if not
treated by deans and tutors, as a man and as a gentleman; but has he any
right to expect to be so treated, if he condescends to adopt the
practices of a mischievous or a truant school boy?

I am no friend to the unnecessary imposition of oaths; but, I own, I do
not see how any thing like deliberate and systematic opposition to
academical authority, can be reconciled with the oath of academical
obedience taken by every freshman. I know well that the usual
construction of that oath,--(I doubt not the legitimate
construction)--is, that the person who takes it will obey the statutes,
or submit to the penalty imposed upon the infraction of them. I am
aware, too, that the violation of the strict letter of many of the
statutes is acquiesced in, and almost sanctioned, by those in authority;
but surely a _deliberate_ and _contumacious_ contravention of the
statutes, accompanied by a natural endeavour to evade punishment, is
hardly consistent with the spirit of the oath. Certainly it is
inconsistent with the spirit of Christianity, which everywhere
inculcates a dutiful submission to the constituted authorities; a
compliance, in all things lawful, with the regulations of the place in
which we are, and of the society which has received us among its
members. No man is compelled to go to the University; but if he does go
thither, he should make up h