When I was rather more than seventeen, I subscribed the 39 Articles at Oxford in order to be admitted to the University.  Subscription was “no bondage,” but pleasure; for I well knew and loved the Articles, and looked on them as a great bulwark of the truth; a bulwark, however, not by being imposed, but by the spiritual and classical beauty which to me shone in them.  But it was certain to me before I went to Oxford, and manifest in my first acquaintance with it, that very few academicians could be said to believe them.  Of the young men, not one in five seemed to have any religious convictions at all:  the elder residents seldom or never showed sympathy with the doctrines that pervade that formula.  I felt from my first day there, that the system of compulsory subscription was hollow, false, and wholly evil.

Oxford is a pleasant place for making friends,—­friends of all sorts that young men wish.  One who is above envy and scorns servility,—­who can praise and delight in all the good qualities of his equals in age, and does not desire to set himself above them, or to vie with his superiors in rank,—­may have more than enough of friends, for pleasure and for profit.  So certainly had I; yet no one of my equals gained any ascendancy over me, nor perhaps could I have looked up to any for advice.  In some the intellect, in others the religious qualities, were as yet insufficiently developed:  in part also I wanted discrimination, and did not well pick out the profounder minds of my acquaintance.  However, on my very first residence in College, I received a useful lesson from another freshman,—­a grave and thoughtful person, older (I imagine) than most youths in their first term.  Some readers may be amused, as well as surprized, when I name the delicate question on which I got into discussion with my fellow freshman.  I had learned from Evangelical books, that there is a twofold imputation to every saint,—­not of the “sufferings” only, but also of the “righteousness” of Christ.  They alleged that, while the sufferings of Jesus are a compensation for the guilt of the believer and make him innocent, yet this suffices not to give him a title to heavenly glory; for which he must over and above be invested in active righteousness, by all Christ’s good works being made over to him.  My new friend contested the latter part of the doctrine.  Admitting fully that guilt is atoned for by the sufferings of the Saviour, he yet maintained, there was no farther imputation of Christ’s active service as if it had been our service.  After a rather sharp controversy, I was sent back to study the matter for myself, especially in the third and fourth chapters of the Epistle to the Romans; and some weeks after, freely avowed to him that I was convinced.  Such was my first effort at independent thought against the teaching of my spiritual fathers, and I suppose it had much value for me.  This friend might probably have been of service to me, though he was rather cold and lawyerlike; but he was abruptly withdrawn from Oxford to be employed in active life.