The means of this culture by the finer arts; the errors, or falls, of the enthusiasm so excited; its extinction by avarice, pride, and lust, in the period of the (so called) Renaissance, and the possibility of a true Renaissance, or Restoration, of courage and pure hope to Christian men in their homes and industries, must form the general subject of the study into which I have henceforth to lead you. In a future course of lectures it will be my endeavour to show you, in the elementary forms of Christian architecture, the evidence of such mental development and decline in Europe from the tenth to the seventeenth century; but remember that my power or any one else's, to show you truths of this kind, must depend entirely on the degree of sympathy you have in yourselves with what is decorous and generous. I use both these words advisedly, and distinctively, for every high quality of art consists either in some expression of what is decent,--becoming,--or disciplined in character, or of what is bright and generous in the forces of human life.
I need not say that I fear no want of such sympathy in you; yet the circumstances in which you are placed are in many respects adverse to it.
237. I find, on returning to the University after a period of thirty years, the scope of its teaching greatly extended, the zeal of its masters certainly undiminished; and, as far as I can judge, the feeling of the younger members of the University better, and their readiness to comply with all sound advice, greater, than in my time. What scandals there have been among us, I think have been in great part accidental, and consequent chiefly on the intense need for excitement of some trivial kind, which is provoked by our restless and competitive work. In temper, in general amenability to right guidance, and in their sense of the advantages open to them, more may now be hoped than ever yet from the students of Oxford--one thing only I find wanting to them altogether--distinctness of aim.
238. In their new schools of science they learn the power of machinery and of physical elements, but not that of the soul; I am afraid, in our new schools of liberal religion they learn rather to doubt their own faiths than to look with patience or respect on those of others; and in our new schools of policy, to efface the canons of the past, without having formed any distinct conception of those which must regulate the institutions of the future.