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We cannot profess either surprise or regret that Convocation should have ratified by a majority of sixty-two the appointment of Dean Stanley to the office of select preacher at Oxford. If the wisdom of the original nomination of the Dean of Westminster was questionable, the results which might have been anticipated had the opposition to his election proved successful would have been of a character sincerely to be deprecated. The defeated party would have been stung into taking reprisals, in the train of which there would have inevitably followed much more of that heartburning and of that enduring bitterness whose presence in a great school of national training is at once melancholy and mischievous. The rejection of Dean Stanley would have been correctly interpreted as a censure upon his opinions, which it may well be questioned whether an University would have been justified in passing on a clergyman who holds one of the highest positions in the English Church.

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If Dr. Stanley's orthodoxy is sufficient to vindicate his tenure of the Deanery of Westminster it must be sufficient also to win for him access to the University pulpit at St. Mary's, and it is difficult to see how the Oxford Convocation could have negatived this position without practically endorsing the theory that a national University is less extensive than a national Church. Moreover, the deep and widespread sympathy, misplaced or not, which would have been created for Dr. Stanley and his party had the vote of Convocation yesterday gone the other way, would at least have been no less undesirable given to the theological views with which his name is associated by his appointment to the Oxford Select Preachership.

The relation borne by the figures of the actual majority to the total number of votes given may be probably accepted as indicative of the real state of academic and public feeling on the subject, while the fact that out of a constituency which can poll between four and five thousand not seven hundred members took part in the division seems to point more conclusively still to the sentiment which must have been uppermost in the mind of a very large proportion of Oxford graduates. We have no doubt whatever that a letter which we published yesterday from an “Ex-Proctor” interprets correctly the conflict of opinion that many a member of Convocation experienced. “I do not,” says this gentleman, “write as a partisan. I regret that the question has been raised, and I am in great doubt what I ought to do, still more what I shall do tomorrow.” It is only upon the hypothesis that this doubt was very extensively participated in by other members of Convocation besides our correspondent that the comparative insignificance of the numerical total of suffrages can be accounted for.

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An “Ex-Proctor” makes a suggestion which is deserving of attention, that in the matter of these select preacherships “either a liberum arbitrium must remain with Convocation, or the mode of nomination must be altered.” That Mr. Burgon acted in a perfectly legal manner in requesting the Vice Chancellor to fix a day for submitting Dean Stanley's appointment to Convocation has not been for a moment denied, nor can there be any reason why Convocation should be expected to ignore a right which is legally its own. It does not appear to us that Mr. Burgon, and his fellow-members of Convocation who thought with him, can be accused of having pursued a policy that can be justly described as unworthy or vexatious. In his letter of a week since to the Vice Chancellor Mr. Burgon mentioned the important fact that “Dean Stanley's name has been again and again suggested by members of the Board for select preacher, and as steadily, ” by Dr. Liddell's predecessors, declined. “Once,” continues Mr. Burgon, “when actually designated, his name was withdrawn in consequence of a private intimation to the Vice Chancellor that if persisted in his appointment would be infallibly opposed.” It is improbably that the Dean of Christ Church was ignorant of these facts when he did not, indeed, propose the Dean of Westminster, but gave the casting vote in his favour, siding with the two proctors against the two professors of divinity; and these are circumstances that must not be left out of consideration. We earnestly trust that their success will not tempt the victorious party to court a future contest upon a similar issue.