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essentially distinct from the London establishments. cent times, nobody ever dreamt of separating the idea of a University from that of a place where the minds of young men are actually instructed and formed. The degrees conferred by Universities are more the accident than the substance of its nature; the "degree" is simply the certificate of merit granted to the alumni. Were there no degrees, the University would remain intact in all its vital energy and power. But in the London figment, the degree is every thing; there is no substance, nothing but an accidental resemblance to those institutions which are real Universities. The persons who graduate in London are educated in the various colleges affiliated to the degree-giving centre in the metropolis; and none of these, as we shall presently show, can answer the purpose we have in view in founding a University in Dublin.

Oxford and Cambridge, again, are real Universities, and no doubt their prizes must sooner or later be both of them completely open to all classes of Englishmen and Irishmen. Say what people will, they are regarded by the nation as national property. Whatever they were before the Reformation, when Henry VIII. and Elizabeth protestantised them they nationalised them. The non-Catholic possessors of Oxford and Cambridge have no possible claim to their position, except on the ground that those noble endowments and edifices are the property of the nation, as much as the Bank of England, the Treasury, or the Custom-House. The king and parliament confided them to the administration of Protestant trustees for national purposes, and in no wise abdicated their own claims to direct what those purposes should be. With the gradual abolition of the exclusive Church-of-Englandism of the nation, the national mind has accordingly gradually prepared itself to adapt the Oxford and Cambridge systems to modern ideas. The Establishment being in possession, which we know is equivalent to nine-tenths of the weight of law, and the Church being pecuniarily bound up with the family interests of the aristocracy, both Whig and Tory, the resistance of the Universities to the progress of the new system has necessarily been obstinate, and until now successful. But that successful resistance cannot continue longer. That latitudinarianism in creed which is now spreading through all classes of respectable Anglicanism, united with the increasingly secular tone of Nonconformity and the spread of democratic principles, makes short work of articles and tests, whenever their abolition will answer the purpose of a successful move in the game of politics. It is the destiny of Oxford and Cambridge to reflect the opinions and system of the House of Commons

for the time being; and the pertinacity with which they may struggle for a time against the spirit of the age will serve only to involve them in a more radical revolution when the hour of their doom is come.

But under no circumstances can Oxford and Cambridge provide a fitting home for the young mind of English and Irish Catholicism. A system of training in which religion only enters as an element of discord, or as an excuse for attacking the very notion of dogmatic truth altogether, can never be otherwise than perilous in the last degree to the youthful Catholic. What can be the moral tone, or the religious element, which is to be acquired in a place where every teacher may have his own creed; where one professor may insinuate that the Christian miracles are myths, and another, that a belief in sacramental grace was the product of mediæval belief in magic; where one college may be Socinian, another Catholic, another Calvinist, and a fourth Deist; where youths mix together in the hours of relaxation without one of the restraints which are peculiarly necessary when the head is hot and the passions vehement, and every second companion whom the young Catholic meets may insinuate to him that there is no such thing as sin, after all,-the notion of the sinfulness of certain actions being an invention of superstition, which no philosopher can ever countenance.

There can be no more fatal error than to imagine that the influence of a University without one uniform, distinct, and pervading religious creed, can be otherwise than utterly antiCatholic. As for the direct philosophic and historical instruction conveyed at such a seminary, it must be a caricature and an imposture. Grant what we will as to the intentions of professors and tutors, and define with the most rigid abstract care the difference between secular and religious teachingbetween moral discipline and dogmatic proselytism-between the facts of history and the opinions of historians,-in practice such distinctions never have existed, and they never can exist. The Church-of-England University must have an Anglican tone; a "no-religion" University must have an infidel tone; a Catholic University must have a Catholic tone. And, inasmuch as we believe that Christianity is from God, that every thing but Catholicism is either a denial or a corruption of Christianity, and that our first duty to our children is to make and keep them good Christians,-nothing should tempt us to expose them to the snares which would beset them in Oxford or Cambridge, however "liberal" those hot-beds of exclusiveness may hereafter become.

As to the Queen's or "Godless" Colleges in Ireland, it is

really insulting to our understandings to propose them as substitutes for a University, whether for Irish or English Catholics. It certainly is not a little cool to propose to those who inherit the faith of Alfred, of Bede, of Bacon, of Wykeham, and of Waynflete, to enrol themselves with ardour on the lists of two or three provincial schools, which without the support of a parliamentary grant would fall to the ground to-morrow; which have neither religion, nor antiquity, nor reputation, nor fixed system, nor practical life, nor learning, nor intellectual power, to give them a solitary title to our respect; whose sole allurements consist in certain endowments for scholarships and fellowships, founded, not for the encouragement of learning, but for the purpose of bribing ready or foolish parents to commit their sons to those nurseries of mediocrity and latitudinarianism. It is not to such schools as these that we are driven by the contemplation of what we have lost at Oxford and Cambridge by the change of religion; if we seek for a restoration of our old academical glories, it will be under nobler auspices than those of Cork, or Galway, or Belfast. If we are not to have a University in reality as well as in name, we will be content with our present colleges in Great Britain and Ireland, and continue, as before, to struggle uphill against difficulties, and to make the most of the advantages we have hitherto possessed.

These colleges, however, are far from supplying that special want which calls for the creation of a University. They are called "Colleges," according to the continental phrase, and according to the custom which is now becoming more common than formerly in this country; but, to use the more usual English term, they are nothing more than schools, and their whole system and arrangements are fashioned for the purposes which are usually understood as contemplated by a "school." In other words, they are designed for boys, and not for young men. They are conducted on plans which are adapted to the characters and capacities of boys up to the ages of from seventeen to nineteen; though accidentally, and from want of any English Catholic University, young men occasionally remain in these colleges till a later period in life, however much they may have outgrown the habits and regulations of the college where they still linger.

To those who are cognisant of English society and the English mind, the bare statement of this fact is a sufficient proof that English and Irish Catholics are still deprived of one of the most important means of education which the young mind requires. Go into the world of literature, politics, or law, and ask those who have attained the highest eminence, whether

their ultimate success has not mainly depended on the training which they went through during the transition period from boyhood to manhood. Taking characters on an average, the years between seventeen and three-and-twenty are the years during which the man is marred or made. It is like that season in the growth of a fruit which intervenes between the blossoming and the visible growth to maturity, when the blossom, as the technical term runs, "sets," and the fairest promise of the flower ends either in rapid death, premature decay, or the production of a healthy and perfect fruit. Then it is that frosts, and mildew, and blight, do their fatal work, or the gales of a single night disappoint the cultivator's brightest expectations. Just such is the time when the boy develops into the man; when that awful gift of his Creator, independence, begins to assert its privileges; when thought begins to assist observation; when the eye learns a range beyond the circle of the school and the family; when a restless desire to try the faculties and to employ the acquirements germinates vigorously and impels to action; when the occupations of actual life are anticipated as realities; when the dicta of authority are freely questioned; when the intellect learns its own strength, and the passions awake to turn it astray. Then it is that the power for good or evil of the vigorouslygrowing mind is finally determined; then it is that a few years spent either in idle languor, or aimless pursuits, or dissipating amusements, or even in a premature devotion to those duties which require the maturity of a full-grown man, almost infallibly stamp the future life with feebleness, or perverseness, or indolence, or unhealthy excitability, or irremediable exhaustion.

For the young mind at that critical period the "University," with its tempered freedom-its conflict of character—its voice of public opinion-its traditionary customs-its manly exercises (both of intellect and body)-its pervading atmo sphere of learning-its venerable associations, especially when added to those charms of architectural, artistic, and natural beauty, which especially become it,-exerts precisely that invigorating, tranquillising, and enlightening influence, which is needed to form the minds of those who are destined in any position to guide and teach their fellow-men. The more rigid rule of a "school"-its narrower routine-its local ideas-its humbler associations-its very memories of seasons which in many instances it is well to forget,-conspire either to cause the young man to rebel against its discipline, or to retain him in the position of a child when, in fact, his nature is already emerging into manhood.

That our existing seminaries should supply this need is obviously impossible; and we have no doubt that if the question were put to our Catholic gentry and aristocracy, those who have paid any attention to the subject would be unanimous in alleging that one of the severest grievances we have had to endure is the loss of those places of education which are fitted, not for boys, but for young men. There are

those, indeed, who conceive that the discipline under which the young are retained, provided only it is gentle and Christian, cannot be too strict, up to the very period of the final entrance into active life. From this opinion, if it is meant to include young men as well as boys, we venture most emphatically to dissent. We conceive that the plunge from the strictness and surveillance of a school into the vortex of the actual world, especially in the case of persons of rank, property, and high social position, is in the last degree perilous, and to be avoided. The transition is so violent, that few can endure it uninjured. The strong too often run wild; the weak are crushed into habitual feebleness; the romantic and imaginative stand aghast at the facts of human life, when they first appear in all their sad reality. The true wisdom we believe to consist in that gradual initiation into the liberty, the responsibility, and the terrible knowledge of life as it is, which a University, and a University alone, can bestow.

There is yet another class of objections raised to the new University, founded on a notion that the establishment of such an institution without the expressed or understood sanction of the government is an inroad on the privileges of parliament or of royalty. No objection is made to our founding schools and colleges for the education of Catholic ecclesiastics and laymen; but there is a something about the idea of a "University" which especially marks it off as subject to the peculiar prerogative of the Queen and her government. The foundation of this Dublin University is conceived to be a fresh “Papal aggression;" a fresh proof of our "divided allegiance;" an utterance of our disloyalty to the crown and constitution of these realms; and being such, as calling for the interposition of the Queen, the Ministry, the House of Commons, or the twelve judges, or whatever other authority may be necessary to put down so audacious an attempt.

Where this idea exists-except in the heads of those headlong persons whose avowed principle it is to crush " Popery" wherever it shows itself-where this idea, we say, exists in the minds of thinking and candid men, it is usually, if not always, connected with some theory or other about the " degrees'