always seized with [34] the greatest avidity by these people, and taken by them as quite justifying their life; and that thus they tend to harden them in their sins.  Now, culture admits the necessity of the movement towards fortune-making and exaggerated industrialism, readily allows that the future may derive benefit from it; but insists, at the same time, that the passing generations of industrialists,—­forming, for the most part, the stout main body of Philistinism,—­are sacrificed to it.  In the same way, the result of all the games and sports which occupy the passing generation of boys and young men may be the establishment of a better and sounder physical type for the future to work with.  Culture does not set itself against the games and sports; it congratulates the future, and hopes it will make a good use of its improved physical basis; but it points out that our passing generation of boys and young men is, meantime, sacrificed.  Puritanism was necessary to develop the moral fibre of the English race, Nonconformity to break the yoke of ecclesiastical domination over men’s minds and to prepare the way for freedom of thought in the distant future; still, culture points out that the harmonious perfection of generations of [35] Puritans and Nonconformists have been, in consequence, sacrificed.  Freedom of speech is necessary for the society of the future, but the young lions of the Daily Telegraph in the meanwhile are sacrificed.  A voice for every man in his country’s government is necessary for the society of the future, but meanwhile Mr. Beales and Mr. Bradlaugh are sacrificed.

Oxford, the Oxford of the past, has many faults; and she has heavily paid for them in defeat, in isolation, in want of hold upon the modern world.  Yet we in Oxford, brought up amidst the beauty and sweetness of that beautiful place, have not failed to seize one truth:—­the truth that beauty and sweetness are essential characters of a complete human perfection.  When I insist on this, I am all in the faith and tradition of Oxford.  I say boldly that this our sentiment for beauty and sweetness, our sentiment against hideousness and rawness, has been at the bottom of our attachment to so many beaten causes, of our opposition to so many triumphant movements.  And the sentiment is true, and has never been wholly defeated, and has shown its power even in its defeat.  We have not won our political battles, we have not carried our [36] main points, we have not stopped our adversaries’ advance, we have not marched victoriously with the modern world; but we have told silently upon the mind of the country, we have prepared currents of feeling which sap our adversaries’ position when it seems gained, we have kept up our own communications with the future.  Look at the course of the great movement which shook Oxford to its centre some thirty years ago!  It was directed, as any one who reads Dr. Newman’s Apology may see, against what in one word maybe called “liberalism.”  Liberalism prevailed; it was the appointed force to do the work of the hour; it was necessary, it was inevitable that it should prevail.  The Oxford movement was broken, it failed; our wrecks are scattered on every shore:—­