It were greatly to be wished, that the promoters of academical education among the Dissenters had been at all times solicitous to guard against the influence of that narrow-minded, exclusive spirit which first created the necessity for their exertions. But unhappily, in the great majority of cases, the same sectarian views have prevailed in them, on a smaller scale, which we observe with so much regret in our national establishments. The object, in almost all of them, seems to have been, not to diffuse sound learning, or to place in the hands of the pupils the torch by which they might explore the truth for themselves, in the exercise of free, enlightened, and, as far as possible, unbiassed inquiry, but to train up partizans of a particular sect; and they have generally adopted the same unfair means of securing this object which, when put into operation against themselves, had occasioned their own exclusion from Oxford and Cambridge; demanding both from tutors and students a declaration of their adherence to a certain system of doctrines, or subscription to a certain specified formula of human composition. In some instances they have even gone beyond the universities in the rigour of their restrictions. Thus Dr. Priestley tells us, that at the academy at Mile End, to which his friends were, at first, desirous to send him, every student was not only required to subscribe his assent to ten printed articles of the strictest Calvinism, but to repeat his subscription every six months.
We may fairly claim it as a distinction (an
