Now far be it from me to apply the term ‘two-penny saint’ to any existing University.  To avoid the accusation I hereby solemnly declare my deep conviction that every single University at this moment in England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland has reasons—­strong in all, in some overwhelmingly strong—­for its existence.  That is plainly said, I hope?  Yet I do maintain that if we go on multiplying Universities we shall not increase the joy; that the reign of two-penny saints lies not far off and will soon lie within measurable distance; and that it will be a pestilent reign.  As we saw in out last lecture the word ’University’—­Universitas—­had, in its origin, nothing to do with Universality:  it meant no more than a Society, organised (as it happened) to promote learning.  But words, like institutions, often rise above their beginnings, and in time acquire a proud secondary connotation.  For an instance let me give you the beautiful Wykehamist motto Manners Makyeth Man, wherein ‘manners’ originally meant no more than ‘morals.’  So there has grown around our two great Universities of Oxford and Cambridge a connotation (secondary, if you will, but valuable above price) of universality; of standing like great beacons of light, to attract the young wings of all who would seek learning for their sustenance.  Thousands have singed, thousands have burned themselves, no doubt:  but what thousands of thousands have caught the sacred fire into their souls as they passed through and passed out, to carry it, to drop it, still as from wings, upon waste places of the world!  Think of country vicarages, of Australian or Himalayan outposts, where men have nourished out lives of duty upon the fire of three transient, priceless years.  Think of the generations of children to whom their fathers’ lives, prosaic enough, could always be re-illumined if someone let fall the word ‘Oxford’ or ‘Cambridge,’ so that they themselves came to surmise an aura about the name as of a land very far off; and then say if the ineffable spell of those two words do not lie somewhere in the conflux of generous youth with its rivalries and clash of minds, ere it disperses, generation after generation, to the duller business of life.  Would you have your mother University, Gentlemen, undecorated by some true study of your mother-English?

I think not, having been there, and known such thoughts as you will carry away, and having been against expectation called back to report them.

     And sometimes I remember days of old
     When fellowship seem’d not so far to seek,
     And all the world and I seem’d far less cold,
     And at the rainbow’s foot lay surely gold,
     And hope was strong, and life itself not weak.

My purpose here (and I cannot too often recur to it) is to wean your minds from hankering after false Germanic standards and persuade you, or at least point out to you, in what direction that true study lies if you are men enough to take up your inheritance and believe in it as a glory to be improved.