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.