Mr. Gladstone, in declaring the intention of the Government to
support the Bill so far as it abolished tests, and to vote against the absurdly inefficient clauses for the reform of the governing body, said very happily of Mr. Fawcett's remark that the infusion of Catholics into the governing body would be "gradual," that he remembered the late Dr. Whewell saying, in a Bridgewater treatise, that in the opinion of some astronomers there are slight deviations of the planets from their orbits which may possibly accumulate till the solar system proves after all to contain within itself the elements of its own destruction :—" But then it is a gradual process, and by the same sort of gradual process my honourable friend proposes to modify the constitution of the University of Dublin." After Mr. Synan, in a speech lengthily but demonstratively showing the attachment not merely of the clergy, but of the Catholic laity of Ireland to a religious system of University Education, had deprecated any interference With the Dublin tests, and argued for his own amendment, which demanded for the Roman Catholics the opportunity at least of a University education apart from Protestants, Dr. Ball made a bitter attack on Mr. Gladstone for not redeeming his promise to legislate on the subject in the name of the Government, taunting him with subjection to Cardinal Cullen's influence, from which he pointedly
'declared Lord llartington to be satisfactorily free. He also attacked severely Mr. Lowe's University theories, and showed the deepest chagrin at Mr. Gladstone's declaration of his intention to take what Trinity College offered as to testa, but to decline accepting it as a settlement of the question.
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