UNIVERSITY EDUCATION IN IRELAND.

SOME worthy men of the positive class of thinkers look upon University Education as some Frenchmen look .upon soap—that is to say, they will admit that it is an elegant duxury, and very little more. There are, happily for the world, others who have juster views of the nature and effects 'of a liberal education. Studies -which will not teach us to .grind corn or to make railways may serve a higher though -more indefinite purpose. If man is (as has been said) "ice for truth and fire for error," it is well to strengthen his native weakness, and to correct his perilous strength. If the particular- :ism of a profession twists and warps the mind, if it hems in the perspective of truth down an ever narrowing lane o monotonous custom, it is well that the branch should, for a time at leait, have grown more freely, and that the eye -should at a happier season have expatiated over a nobler landscape, and gazed upon a loftier sky. If, as we grow -older, we must became more or less sectarian, under penalty -of forfeiting wholesome earnestness and masculine conviction, it is well for us, in the generous days of youth, to live for a while in communion with those thoughts which, far more truly than mere commerce, realize Dryden's noble line :—

"And make one city of the Universe."

If again, we must live withmen of a different creed, pray at ano- ther shrine, kneel at another ritual, be buried under another sod, we must yet meet at a thousand turns,as fellow citizens and fel- low men, those whom we can scarcely recognize in the fullest :sense as fellow believers. Surely in a country like Ireland, -where the astute Northern or the fiery Southern looks upon ids own division of the land as the religious Goshen, outside which the light scarcely falls, it is desirable for the Roman *Catholic to learn that every Protestant is not an Arian or a

Pantheist, an infidel or a profligate, and scarcely less so for the Protestant to see that every Roman Catholic is not neces- sarily a besotted idolater or a bloody Papist.

In Ireland these obvious enough remarks are of primary importance. As the great Protestant University of Dublin does not command, and cannot be expected to secure the con- fidence of Roman Catholic parents, as the connection between it and the Irish Church, which is so beneficial to both, neces- sarily tinges it with a colour which few would wish it to lose ; and as it appeared desirable to diffuse more widely the benefits of a university curriculum, successive liberal govern- ments since the troubled time of Lord Clarendon, and notably the present Viceroy and Secretary for Ireland, have established and carried on the Queen's 'University. Side by side with the Queen's Colleges, originally formulated in theory by the remarkable man who was once the companion of Whately, in the Oriel Common Room, and who is now an Oratorian Father, and since that time coarsely blocked out by the vulgar Ultramontanism of Archbishop Cullen, has grown up another system of the narrowest and most exclusive sectarianism.

About two or three months ago, the Queen's University of Ireland made a rather imposing public appearance at St. Pat- rick's Hall. The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the Archbishop of Dublin, the Chief Secretary, and a goodly company graced the pageant with their presence. Only a few weeks since, on the 26th of November, a meeting took place in the Catholic University of Ireland, in Stephen's Green, which was evidently intended as a counter demonstration. It may not be unprofitable to direct attention to the two Universities, to the principles which they represent, and to their probable future.

And, first, for the Catholio University. The creation of ideal universities has ever been a favourite philosophical toy with superior minds. The New Atlantis of Lord Bacon is the most gorgeous of such visions. It rises like an exhalation—a sort of mediteval Oxford—as conceived by a poetical undergraduate of twenty years ago, with a dash of the French Academy and the Royal Society superadded- a quaint hybrid between the Great Exhibition and the New Jerusalem. Even Cowley's College is poor enough after this. Milton, in his famous Traetate, has given us another instance. That work abounds with principles of the most practical character which have since become axioms of all true intel- lectual culture, viewed, however, under

"The light that never was on sea or land— The consecration and the poet's dream."

Bishop Berkeley, perhaps, had formed such a conception of the college in the Bermudas, for which he was so ready to resign his brilliant prospects. It is impossible to read the masterly articles of Sir William Hamilton on university re- form, especially in the passages where he dilates on the Louvain of two or three hundred years ago, without per- ceiving what a tinge of romance had fallen upon a mind es- sentially unromantic. Cambridge became a den of mathema- tical barbarism, and Oxford spoor grammar school, where the upper boys learned a little logic, compared with the great seat of learning, where conferences were held de omni seibili, where everybody was for ever examining some one, and where Mr. Menzel might, perhaps, have chanced just to ear cape a pluck in Schola Logiere e Metayhysicce. Quite recently, certain great prizes have been adjudicated in France by a committee, of which Mr. Cobden and Sir James Kay Shuttle-worth are corresponding members, and of which no less a personage than Prince Napoleon is president. These prizes are given by M. Barbier, a rich manufacturer, for the best essays on the establishment of a great international uni- versity, in which the languages of the four chief nations of Europe are to be agreeably interspersed with "singing, gym- nasties, dancing, fencing, equitation, and natation," and in which instructions on political economy, comparative legisla- tion, and contemporary history, are to be happily consistent with "la plus grande somme possible de libert6." No such creation has over surpassed, in mystical and visionary eloquence, the idea. Bo exquisitely sketched by Dr. Newman in his various essays upon university education. For those persons in Ireland who might happen to have remembered the days when St. Mary's, Oxford was crowded, as often as a great leader of English thought preached there, it must have been a strange thing to see and hear Father Newman in the Rotunda. The thin face and forehead, furrowed with lines of thought, and wrinkled as with anguisli of the spirit ; the features above so like, in mouth and chip. so unlike, the busts of Locke; the sweet peculiar voice, suggestive of church organs and Latin hymns, seemed strangely out of place. Page after page he read that unri- valled prose, pointed epigram, nervous declamation, philosophi- cal wisdom strangely blended with fallacies and platitudes, and descriptions that glowed with the richest colours of poetry. Besides a few tradesmen and Protestant clergymen, the audience consisted of a knot of priests, some scowl- ing, some jovial, to whom the lecture was about as intelligible as would have been a chorus in the " Aga- memnon." According to the lecturer, the question of Irish university education was easily solved. "Peter had spoken." A university was to be created. Was not the physical in unison with the moral? Was not Dublin an Athens? Did not the sea in her bay scintillate and flush like the long heaving of the violet ..pan? All depended upon two princi- ples, one religious, the other intellectual and moral. The reli- gious principle is that the Pope is Christ's vicar; the intellectual principle is that a university is equivalent to universitat scientiarum. The various sciences are attendant upon theology, the queen whom all the handmaidens rise up and call blessed. If theology be omitted from a university course, a.s in Pro- testant lands it must be, in the long run, wholly or in part, that the authorities of that university are caught in flagrante delicto of moral and intellectual suicide. Their tmiversitas loses its very existence, forfeits its very name, and becomes no universitas at all.

All this structure reposed upon a fallacy which can scarcely have escaped Dr. Newman himself. Universitas is not equi- valent to universitas scientiarumin fact nor in meaning. Not in fact, —for if it were so, Oxford was no university when it had not a chair of Political Economy, nor Louvain, when there were no lectures in Paleontology. The Popes were simply mistaken when they chartered universities for the encourage- ment of one single faculty. Not in meaning :—for in classical Latin as in the title-deeds and statutes of universities, uni- versitas means simply a collective body, and hence, by an easy analogy, the universitas of faculties or of colleges. But more practical influences than any which arise from verbal discussions are said to have been at work in removing Dr. Newman from the position of Rector of the Catholic Univer- sity of Ireland. Unless we are much misinformed, his high sense of honour was wounded by vulgar infractions of very plain principles of honesty in reference to the payments due to certain professors, chiefly English "converts," and he was forced to remember that he bad been an English gentleman before he became a Roman Catholic priest. However this may have been, with the removal of Dr. New- man the Catholic University must have lost very much. The presence of a scholar and a gentleman like its Rector was cer- tainly attractive to some Roman Catholics of rank and for- tune. Liberal laymen of that creed were of course, aware that he was as Ultramontane as Dr. Cullen or any of his nominees. But Dr. Newman has himself remarked that dif- ferent people, or the same people at different times, may hold views, the same as far as verbal expression goes, ins very different way. The Omtorians, as U. de Sacy has observed, —and Malebranche and Newman may stand for in- stances—have always had a singular amount of originality in their exposition and interpretation of Roman dogma. A man who has so long breathed the air of free thought, and kept the best company which the human mind can afford, a passionate student of Aristotle and Bacon, may hold the same dogmas with a Cullen or a M'Hale, but they are not the same to him. No doubt this was felt by the persons to whom

we allude. It was not, however, to be, that the author of the "Development of Religious Doctrine" was to become, in old Lord Auchinleck's fierce language, "a dominie who keepit a schule and called it an acaudemy.' He departed for Ireland, as some touching allusions show, with a saddened heart. The vulgar sectarianism of the so-called university has increased. The most prodigious efforts have failed to make the Roman Catholic laity take any real interest in its welfare. Lord Palmerston has happily felt himself strong enough to refuse it a charter.

The meeting in the chapel at Stephen's Green, on the 26th Nov., was ostensibly for the purpose of distributing prizes and conferring a Doctor's degree upon Professor Cleary. The large

building wee, we believe, rather indifferently sued. Of the Roman Catholic prelates, but seven found it convenient to

attend. The real event of the day was, however, the delivery

of a boutade by Dr. Woodlock, the Rector of the University. That elaborate composition may be divided into three portions.

The first was a panegyric upon the achievements of the Church of the middle ages in the foundation of universities. The second was an attack upon the Queen's Colleges, as not only without religion, but without history or mental science.

The third section was a satire upon Lord Carlisle's and Sir Robert Peel's speeches in St. Patrick's Hall. Lord Carlisle in his genial speech had grouped together those heroes of the faith who belong to universal Christendom—those selected

fruits, as it were, of the great tree that fills the whole earth; and, in reference to which, we do not ask upon what branch they have grown, content with the hue and fragrance which they have received from the summers of God. Lord Carlisle happened to associate Fenelon and Luther; we need not say that the wrath of Dr. Woodiock waxes hot at this conjunction.. Sir Robert Peel alluded to the story of Galileo. Dr. Wood, lock cites a well-known passage from Macaulay, which tenda to exculpate the authorities of the Roman Church in. reference to that transaction. He might have cited a. much more weighty passage from one whose opinion on such matters is more decisive than that of the brilliant. essayist—Dr. Whewell, in the "Theological Extracts, from the History and Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences."' After a quotation from poor Dr. Newman's elegant vaticina- tions upon the prospects of the Catholic University of Ire- land, Dr. Woodlock closes with a blaze of indignation against the Government for refusing a charter to the institution over which he presides. There are various points in this address which admit of contradiction. For instance, the assertion that mental science is not taught in the Queen's University. What would Pro-

fessors M'Cosh, Morel, and Moffatt say to this? Mental and. moral science is supposed to flourish especially at Oxford and.

in Scotland. Yet, more than once at the examination for Indian writerships competitors from the Queen's University of Ireland have either outstripped, or come very close to, the best men front Oxford, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh, in this very department. Indeed, we believe that at Belfast, at least, it is sometimes complained that logical and metaphysical learning is rather unduly favoured. But we must pass on. and remark upon Dr. Woodlock's figures. Here are his sta- tistics. He speaks of three hundred students, which looks rather respectable for a young and self-supporting institution._

But of this number one hundred and fourteen appear to attend. evening classes only, and one hundred and sixteen are medical students, so that severity only of the three hundred can be looked upon as receiving such university education as the place can afford ! It is certainly pleasant to contrast with this poor exhibition. the meeting which took place about two or three months ago in.

St. Patrick's Hall, under the presidency of Lord Carlisle. The, old paintings of St. Patrick's legendary doings upon the ceiling, whose battening is beginning to crack and gape with damp and years, may not vie with the frescoes which the same elegant hand that adorned the chapel of Merton College has placed round the church in Stephen's. Green. Yet many will think that the mundane and courtly associations of the one are more in keeping with a liberal education than the tawdry gaudiness with. which modern Romanism overlays the awful pomp of the- Latin ritual in the other. Certainly, to a thoughtful observer, the modest ceremonial in Dublin Castle was. full of hope for Ireland. Ask some young Oxonian or Cantab what he thinks of the appearance of those youths in academic costume ? He will say that it is not "so shady" after all. Listen to those names. They belong to no par- ticular section of the community. One reminds us of the- northern revival, another of the cabbage-garden rebellion ,-

one has the twang of Antrim about him; another is rich with the Bocca Toscana of Cork. It was impossible to hear the

President's speech without feeling that he had struck the right chord. There was much happiness in the eloquent and. clearly enunciated sentences in which he compared the. peaceful rivalry between north and south with that other struggle over the Atlantic. Sir Robert Peers liberal punt gave him the right to advise; and the fact, which he put strongly, of the yearly increase of students, coupled with the favourable opinions of such Protestants as the good Arch- bishop of Armagh, and of such Roman Catholics as the late Sir Thomas Redington, must tell upon the Irish public at least.

Here, then, are two opposite principles at work in regard to university education in Ireland. In the one ease, a high apriori theory of separate and sectarian, dignified with the title of religious education—repudiated, or unwillingly accepted by Irish Roman Catholics. In the other case, a non-sectarian education, coupled with the freest exercise of the students' faith, more acceptable to Roman Catholic parents than its opposite, and largely supported by Protestants of every name. Something is said of a sort of jealousy and dislike upon the

part of the University of Dublin. We can scarcely believe it. At all events, we must freely say that the existence of another university in Ireland is likely to do mach good. Every university NC= to WI to have its congenital excellence and its peculiar weakness. Oxford is at once elegant and philosophical, but she is apt to be dilettante, conceited, and unreal. The Cambridge man is sharp and practical, but hard sad angular. Cambridge wants Oxford musica; Oxford wants Cambridge gymnastica; Cambridge lacks poetry, Oxford exacti- tude. The University which has produced among living men Cairns and Whiteside, Salmon and Graves, Fitzgerald and O'Brien, need not fear a comparison with Oxford and Cambridge. Perhaps she, too, has her failures. Possibly she is apt to engender some of the assurance of conscious strength. The very extent of the course which she prescribes may cultivate the memory sometimes at the expense of the judgment, and leave the reason overloaded by a weight of imperfectly assimilated facts and systems. A narrow and sectarian spirit may somewhat too often be found among her graduates. The existence of another university may be found in the long run to tell upon the older and prouder sister.

We cannot prophesy with the eloquence or with the assur- ance of Dr. Newman. A prouder university than any in our isles, blessed by a Pope, founded by the great Ximenes, and once attended by 8,000 students, is now a heap of ruins. But it seems to us that the so-called Catholic University of Ireland will in a few years sink into an upper boarding-school for Illtramontane boys. The youths from all lands, whom the Oratorian Father paints like doves flying over the blue seas to the windows, will be represented by a few Murphies and O'Tooles, carrying oatmeal and cakes in carpet-bags from the paternal home in Roscommon or Kerry. Nor can we atone for our want of imagination by any magnificent delineation of the future of the Queen's University of Ireland. To extend the advantages of a liberal education a degree down- wards in the social scale • to lend a beneficent assistance to some virtuous and struggling young men, who might other- wise remain in penury; to help onward the current of thought, which purifies the vulgar stagnation of material cares; to produce now and then one of those rare blossoms or exquisite fruits which a university points to with exulta- tion and a country with praise; to bring together men of different creeds upon a common ground; these are the modest, but very practical achievements which we predict for the Queen's University. And we believe, too, that in future days the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland will be spoken of as a Viceroy whose enlightened patronage of liberal education -evinced a large mind as well as a large heart; who performed the difficult feat of keeping an even balance between op- posing creeds without the surrender of his own convictions.