Cardinal Manning opened on Tuesday a new Roman-Catholic Church at
Oxford, dedicated to-St. Aloysius. He took as his text the motto of Oxford University, "Dominus illuminatio mea," "The Lord is my light," and'descanted on her great fall since the time when,-fed on-the mediaeval phllosophy•of the Church, she was the nursing- mother of great saints, and on her vastly inferior position in the present day, when, given up to wranglings of human schools over doubtful theories, she has become the intellectual minister to a hesitating and fragmentary world. There is, no doubt, truth in the comment. A University cannot pretend to give the same solidity to character, when the foundation of all her learning is laid in a quicksand of mutable opinions, as she can when the elementary assumptions of the intellectual world are at least all: fixed, whether they be true or false. Character loses, we freely admit, though knowledge gains, by the unfix- ing of the great landmarks of belief; but that is no reason why we• are to shut our eyes to unsettling phenomena in the intellectual field of view, which force themselves on the observation -of all open-eyed observers, and which are not of human making, though they furnish the answer to human questioning. The Church which is "founded on a rock" must be an Observatory as well as a Church, or it cannot be even a Church of the highest order. It would be difficult to assert this. of Rome, who no doubt looks strictly to God as her light, but modulates very carefully with coloured media the rather old-fashioned window-panes by which she allows that light to enter in.
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