DR. PLA.YFAIR AND THE IRISH QUESTION. UNIVERSITY
DR. LYON PLAYFAIR is an authority on University questions to whom every educated man listens with the -expectation of instruction. He is not merely a man of grasp and culture, but he is a man of strong popular sympathies. He has pleaded heartily for the University opportunities of the very poor, and in a recent debate spoke with the most cordial praise of the Scotch system, which opens a University education to all the abler sons even of peasants and artisans. Yet, like many another politician, when he comes to speak of Ireland, a change comes o'er the spirit of his dream, and he writes as if a University education were to be the monopoly of the middle and higher classes. Not merely so, but he actually puts aside the Catholic priesthood of Ireland, in a very large degree of course peasant-born, as adequately provided for by the narrow means and necessarily inadequate system of the semi- naries for priests at Maynooth and elsewhere, where no degrees can be given. He assumes that we may exclude the priests' needs altogether from our consideration when speaking of the requirements of University Education. In his letter to the Times of last Saturday, Dr. Lyon Playfair, after putting forth statistics into the controversy concerning which we do not intend to go, as we do not believe that they affect the question at issue, mentions that, judging by the experience of England and Scotland, about one-fifth of the total number of lads at secondary schools, i.e., of the middle-class boys, might be expected to go to the University. He admits that the number of lads in these secondary schools is about 6,000 of each creed, Catholic and Protestant, and argues that of these at least 1,200 might be expected to get a University training. The 1,200 Protestants are, he says, foirnd in the Universities, Trinity College, and the Queen's Colleges ; but of the 1,200 Catholics, only 300 (and he appears to be over-rating the number) are found there. Where, then, are the others? The others, he thinks, are at the priests' seminaries. "The Roman Catholic system re- quires that they should be taught apart, and hence they do not go to the Universities." Dr. Playfair, therefore, cheerfully concludes that as he does not see the sources whence "a large or even a respectable accession to Roman Catholic students can be obtained for the Irish Universities," it is unjustifiable "to revolutionise a University system which is doing good work, and into which all its friends are willing to introduce judicious reforms." We cannot help thinking that the wish is father to the thought. Dr. Playfair dislikes so excessively the Roman Catholic restraints on science, that he cannot
sent grounds of the distrust, of University teaching in Ireland, any considerable number of Roman Catholics would be found to avail themselves of the new privileges. Yet it is danger- ous work and bad statesmanship to keep up what five- sixths of the people of a country declare to be a great bar to the higher education, on the strength of evidence satisfactory only to the other sixth and its Protestant allies, that even if the
bar were removed it would be of no real avail. And, indeed, we altogether deny that the present University system is
working so well that the changes proposed would be in any degree likely to injure,—we believe they would greatly stimulate,—it.
But to keep to the one point of Dr. Lyon Playfair's letter on which the limes of Thursday lays so much stress,—the large
proportion of Catholics who are drafted from the secondary schools into the priesthood, and who can have therefore, says Dr. Playfair, no part in the reformed University system. Let us admit, even, that the Roman Catholic system,—which dates, by the way, no farther back than the Council of Trent,—favours, for it does not require, the system of separate seminaries for the priesthood. How would that prevent a very considerable number of Irish priests from being educated for a degree in Arts, if the examination for that degree were of a kind which need not alarm the Roman Catholic authorities ? Grant even, what there is no occasion to grant, that the seminaries would
not be removed to Dublin, so that during the period in which the general education of the candidates for priesthood
was being acquired, they could attend the best University classes of Catholic teachers intended to prepare for the degree. Sup- posing that this were so,—and we do notbelieve it would be by any means generally so,—for Catholic priests frequently in
England, and not unfrequently in Ireland, receive a great part of their general education with laymen,—yet what greater bene-
fit could we confer on Ireland than to induce the Roman Catholic authorities so to enlarge the training of the priesthood as to fit a large number of them for the degree in Arts before they apply themselves to their more special theological studies ?
The usual custom is for the candidates for the priesthood to enter a seminary at about sixteen and to receive ordination at twenty-four. Of these eight years the first three are neces- sarily spent in great measure in general training, and once open an Irish degree without any " taint " on it to all Irish students, and we should find the ambition of the Irish priesthood for social influence and the status of men of learning, bringing up numbers of the candidates for the degree, which they could easily earn at the age of nineteen or twenty, so leaving five, or at least four, complete years for strictly theological studies. Not only so, but we should have plenty of young men reserving
the expression of their -wish to enter the priesthood until after
they had taken their degree, when of course the authorities of the seminaries would admit 'them to the theological course at the point to which they 'would have attained had they entered the seminary as boys. Such candidates for the priest- hood as these would have had the full benefit of a genuinely liberal education in common with laymen, and is it for such men as Dr. Playfair to put impediments in the -way of so great an improvement of the ecclesiastical system in 'Ireland as would be involved in the liberalising effect of a University education on the Roman Catholic priesthood ? While the only Irish University degree to be acquired implies an education thoroughly distrusted by the Roman Catholic authorities, it is of course wholly impossible to look for such results. But once establish a University system of which Roman Catholics will not be jealous, 'and one of the greatest and most beneficial of all the effects would be the liberalising influence it weuld exercise over the priesthood itself.
The simple fact of the case is that the frantic re- action against fairness to Catholics which the Infallibility decree has produced is so hardening the hearts of Liberals, that they are becoming blind to the very ends which they pro- fess to desire to promote. If it is of the highest importance that laymen should be liberally educated, is it not of still more importance that those should be liberally educated whom we-re- gard as separated by their duties into a caste of narrow prepos- sessions and unsoftened prejudices Are we going, in our terror of Roman Catholicism, to decree that it shall always keep the hard and narrow type which marks it in a country in a University which assumes training by non-Catholic historians in anti-Catholic text-books of history, and training in the psychology of Mill and Bain, without any consideration of the Catholic replies to those acute thinkers Dr. Playfair and his party are really working against the cause of national education, evidently on the desperate assumption that educa- tion and Roman Catholicism are antithetical terms. We, on the contrary, hold that though in governing a Catholic country we should insult no genuine Catholic feeling, at the same time we ought to co-operate heartily with the most earnest of the edu- cational party, and so use that faith in culture which the tide of modern progress forces almost as much on Catholics as on Protestants, as to test the reality of Roman Catholic dogmas by bringing them into the closest contact with the highest know- ledge and philosophy of the day. We cannot do this without admitting the definite safeguards for which all true Catholics contend, and which in theory at least are not unreasonable ; but even with these safeguards, the impression which a wide know- ledge and thorough culture make, we will not say on the faith of Roman Catholics, but on the exclusive mode of holding it, has never been small ; and it is one of the first objects of true statesmen to gain the benefit of this softening and widening influence for the priesthood of the nation.
Nor do we believe at all that the only benefit to be derived from a University system which Roman Catholics can heartily approve, will be confined to the priests. It is obvious on Dr. Playfair's own figures, even more than on the corrections of some of those figures which Mr. Kavanagh and Dr. Lyons show in last Thursday's Times to be in all probability need- f al,—corrections to which Dr. Playfair's letter of Friday contains no adequate reply,—that the number of Catholics who choose learned professions other than the priesthood, is far beneath the number of Protestants. We believe this to be due simply to these facts, first, that till of late years the prizes open to Catholics in these professions have been much fewer, and next, that the present University system is unwelcome to Catholic feeling. The one cause is already fast disappearing, and the number of Catholics who enter learned professions is becoming relatively larger every year ; the other cause would disappear with the reform we are advocating. At all events, it is the very blindness of Pro- testant prejudice to defend with fanatical zeal a barrier which, whether it be efficient or not, is believed by Roman Catholics to be efficient in excluding their sons from the influence of the higher culture. Nor is there anything to show for the fears which Dr. Playfair's party profess to entertain. Trinity College, Dublin, does a moderately good work for a very moderate number of the Irish people. There is no reason to suppose it would do less, if it were denuded of some of that superfluous wealth which it received as a national University, not as a University of any- one creed. The Queen's Colleges are hardly doing even a moderately good work. Their faculties of Arts at least are pretty well recognised by impartial obser- vers as failures. Neither the one institution nor the other provides a high education for the Catholic laity of Ireland, and so their friends are compelled to maintain that no demand for that sort of education exists amongst them. It is a vicious assumption, even if it be true, for there is no pretence for keep- ing up an °bottles which, if it has any effect, has a mischievous effect. But it is in our belief as false an assumption as it is a vicious one, and we regret to see men to whom Great Britain owes a great debt of gratitude, devoting their energies to show that any class of people do not value and will not use the means of the higher education, in the hope of justifying what may be called hostile differential duties on the education of earnest Roman Catholics, and corresponding bounties on that of lax Catholics. We, for our parts, care more to get a little sound general culture into the strict Catholics,—the teachers of Catholic children,—than to polish to the last point the education of theological indifferentists who are Catholics only in name. Dr. Mayfair in his letter to the Times of yesterday professes his deep regret that the Irish peasantry do not, like the Scotch peasantry, eagerly seek University culture. If he really feels the regret, he is bound to aid in removing the one insuperable obstacle to that change of feeling.
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