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The Study of Theology at Cambridge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 April 2011

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Summary

“Were a German scholar to give his opinion on our universities, he would say that they constitute only a philosophical faculty with a small intermixture of theology.”

—Journal of Education, vol. x. p. 69.

The American, and to a great extent the Continental, idea of a University, is an institution for purposes of liberal education, which, besides a general academic department, comprises three special faculties, Law, Physic, and Divinity, to which the other faculty is deemed preparatory. The existence of these separate faculties is generally considered with us the distinctive mark of a University as opposed to a College. Judged by this rule the English Universities would be no Universities at all. The faculties of law and physic are represented in them by the slightest vestiges. Thus at Cambridge there is a Professor of Civil Law who lectures and examines a class of about twenty-four men a-year, and a Downing Professor of the Laws of England, who does not lecture or examine at all—at least, he did not in my day. The Professors of Botany, Chemistry, and Anatomy, have classes varying from three to thirty. Medical school, in the ordinary sense of the term, there is none. Ask an English University man why these things are so, and he will answer that it is because the purely professional part of Law and Physic cannot be taught anywhere so well as at the metropolis, where the great hospitals and great courts are.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010
First published in: 1852

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