This Cathedral played a very important role in the history of modern Protestantism. John Wesley first preached about his conversion in this church after which he became persona non grata here but still managed to found Methodism. John Keble started the Oxford movement here. It moved the Anglican Church closer to Catholicism by preaching the return to the orthodoxy of the "old church" and a renewed authority of the priesthood, both things that had been anathema to the thinkers and doers who had produced the Protestant reformation.

A person would need a week to see everything in Oxford. We only had one day, so we only visited the Natural History Museum and the Pitt-Rivers Anthropology Museum, since they are housed in the same building. We’ll try to describe that experience.

There’s really no way to describe the two museums, except to say "Wow". We stopped at the Natural History Museum first because we wanted to see the Stonesfield Meglasaurus. Yes, it was found in the village where our friends live. Long ago, that town had been the source of very fine slate for roof tiles. The fossil bones were found in the early 1800’s but not named for another decade or so. It was, in fact, the first set of fossil bones to be called with the identifying "saurus". At the time, no one knew what it was or how old it was.

Coincidentally, Ron just read a book about the amateur scientists who collected these specimens in the early 1800’s. (The book is called "The Dragon Seekers") For quite a while these discoverers tried to fit the fossils into the Bible’s view of the origins of life by theorizing that God had made the most primitive animals first, progressing ever onward through the reptiles and then the mammals until His crowning achievement of man. But later, when the bones of a human were found in a layer that also contained the bones of a mammoth (indicating that they were alive at the same time), people were forced to rethink the ever onward and progressive theory of the creation of life. The bones of both the human and the mammoth that made up the challenging find were also there in the Natural History Museum. All this was pre-Darwin. There were a lot of great exhibits of dinosaurs, geology, mineralogy etc. and a great description of the meeting of the Royal Society of Geographers in the 19^th century when Charles Darwin’s ideas were expounded. It was apparently a very raucous meeting. That’s no surprise!