es,
necessarily invest it with the functions of a University; and that
atmosphere of intellect, which in a former age hung over Oxford or
Bologna or Salamanca, has, with the change of times, moved away to the
centre of civil government. Thither come up youths from all parts of
the country, the students of law, medicine, and the fine arts, and the
_employes and attaches_ of literature. There they live, as chance
determines; and they are satisfied with their temporary home, for they
find in it all that was promised to them there. They have not come in
vain, as far as their own object in coming is concerned. They have not
learned any particular religion, but they have learned their own
particular profession well. They have, moreover, become acquainted
with the habits, manners, and opinions of their place of sojourn, and
done their part in maintaining the tradition of them. We cannot then
be without virtual Universities; a metropolis is such: the simple
question is, whether the education sought and given should be based on
principle, formed upon rule, directed to the highest ends, or left to
the random succession of masters and schools, one after another, with a
melancholy waste of thought and an extreme hazard of truth.

Religious teaching itself affords us an illustration of our subject to
a certain point. It does not indeed seat itself merely in centres of
the world; this is impossible from the nature of the case. It is
intended for the many, not the few; its subject matter is truth
necessary for us, not truth recondite and rare; but it concurs in the
principle of a University so far as this, that its great instrument, or
rather organ, has ever been that which nature prescribes in all
education, the personal presence of a teacher, or, in theological
language, Oral Tradition. It is the living voice, the breathing form,
the expressive countenance, which preaches, which catechises. Truth, a
subtle, invisible, manifold spirit, is poured into the mind of the
scholar by his eyes and ears, through his affections, imagination, and
reason; it is poured into his mind and is sealed up there in
perpetuity, by propounding and repeating it, by questioning and
requestioning, by correcting and explaining, by progressing and then
recurring to first principles, by all those ways which are implied in
the word "catechising." In the first ages, it was a work of long time;
months, sometimes years, were devoted to the arduous task o