the test that the time devoted to it has not been wasted. Their real value lies, of course, chiefly in this, though we must not depreciate the solid advantages which are involved in the possession of such a certificate of proficiency and cultivation as is contained in the simple title of Bachelor or Master of Arts. Even putting aside the many actual cases in which such a certificate is either absolutely necessary or of great positive advantage in facilitating the progress of those who have gained it in some profession or career, it cannot be doubted that the consideration which it brings with it in common estimation is no unlawful 'object of ambition, and no unsubstantial advantage in the battle of life. For this, unfortunately, we have no University of our own to go to. No Catholic University exists that has the power to confer degrees recognised in this country, and no University of the kind is likely to exist in England until the Catholic body is far more numerous and more powerful than it is. Universities are great institutions, and they require little less than a nation to feed them. The course of legislation may, perhaps, soon confer the requisite powers upon the Catholic University of Ireland, and it may be possible for Colleges in England to be associated to that body in such a way as to give them their share of the benefit. Till the need is provided for in that or in some other similar way, we must perforce seek degrees, if we are to have them at all, at the Protestant Universities.

We are desirous of speaking on this subject as simply and plainly as possible, as we are convinced that the more it is discussed with calmness and sobriety, the more certain shall we be to arrive, not only at the best solution of the difficulty, but at a solution which will readily commend itself to all candid and dispassionate minds. In the first place, it is allowed on all hands that at present there is but one choice open to us. We have more than once said that, at the present moment, as the elder Universities still require residence in the candidates for their degrees, Catholics as a body are debarred from availing themselves of them. In the second place, no one can have watched with any care the progress of gradual expansion

which has been going on at the great national Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, without seeing that it is not beyond the range of possibility that the time may come when they may open their doors a little wider, and allow all comers—or at least all comers from Colleges that may make arrangements with them-to present themselves at their examination boards for matriculation and for the degrees, while the whole process of instruction may be carried on at a distance, as is now the case with a number of Colleges, Catholic and Dissenting, which are associated to the London University. We must confess candidly that this sort of alliance, or affiliation, or whatever else it may be called, is not, in the proper sense of the term, University Education at all-even in the most favourable case imaginable, in which the real training of the mind in the first place, or the acquisition of knowledge on special subjects in the second place, may be left to the Catholic Colleges who perform all the work, in so liberal a way as not to interfere seriously with their proper curriculum. A merely examining body does not really educate in any true sense.' * Still the time may come when Oxford or Cambridge may be ready to examine all comers as well as London. If such a time should ever come— and we see no reason whatever for not desiring that it

*We may remind our readers of the grave words of the great Catholic writer on Education of our time, who has so clearly said all that is worth saying on this very subject. "I protest to you, gentlemen," says Dr. Newman (Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Education, p. 232), “that if I had to choose between a so-called University which dispensed with residence and tutorial superintendence, and gave its degrees to any person who passed an examination in a wide range of subjects, and a University which had no professors or examinations at all, but merely brought a number of young men together for three or four years and then sent them away, as the University of Oxford is said to have done some sixty years since, if I were asked which of these two methods was the better discipline of the intellectmind, I do not say which is morally the better, for compulsory study must be good, and idleness an intolerable mischief--but if I must determine which of the two courses was the most successful in training, moulding, and enlarging the mind; which sent out men the more fitted for their secular duties; which produced better public men-men of the world, whose names would descend to posterity—I have no hesitation in giving the preference to that University which did nothing, over that which exacted of its members an acquaintance with every science under the sun."

may come the opportunities opened to those who find themselves in the position in which we ourselves now are will have been greatly and beneficially widened. We shall have all we have now, and a good deal more. There is no use in arguing with prejudices or suspicions. If there are any persons who see an immeasurable distance, or any distance at all, between the same examination of the same students, conducted on the same principles and by the same men, and issuing in the same degree, in the one case in the schools at Oxford and in the other case in an examination room in London, we must wait till such persons rest their position upon some tangible and argumentative grounds before we can approach it as matter of reasoning. If, as far as examinations are concerned, Oxford and Cambridge become London, there can be no more objection to the former than to the latter. We are not now going to prejudge the issue of the experiment which is being so honestly tried by some of our Catholic teachers, whether it be possible to give a thoroughly Catholic training in philosophy and mental science, and at the same time continue with profit the connection with the London system of examination, and we may even heartily wish that success may attend that experiment. It would be idle, however, to deny that it may possibly end in failure, in consequence of the very important difficulties to which we have had to draw attention in former articles, and this possibility is quite enough to justify the wish that other alternatives may be open to Catholics, and the consideration of the principles on which the choice between such alternatives will be made.

We must refer, though most briefly, to the difficulties which beset the Catholic teacher in the task of which we have spoken. His own system is shaped on ancient models, and modern Universities, especially those which make it their boast completely to embody the ideas of the nineteenth century, require a more comprehensive field of study than he is ready willingly to adopt, fearing, as he most truly does, that multifariousness of scanty information is sure to breed shallowness, and to dissipate rather than to train the mind. He has to sacrifice

his great vital principle, that Universities should train and discipline the mind, rather than cram it, untrained and undisciplined, with knowledge on a multitude of special subjects. Again, his own traditional studies, especially the thorough scholarlike mastery of the two great languages of the ancient world, are comparatively unimportant in the new system. Again, it is a matter of importance to him that, even in classics, the examination. should either be conducted on the old and sound principle of fixing no special books or parts of books—the principle generally adopted in "scholarship" examinations at Oxford and Cambridge-or that the choice of books presented by the candidate should, within certain limits. and under certain conditions, be left to himself. Even on moral grounds this liberty is often most necessary to him. Not all examining boards take the strict view as to the less pure parts of the classical authors that Catholics take; and when the examination has to range over modern languages also, it has sometimes been found that a bad French novel has been selected for the study of youths of seventeen or eighteen. Again, the less the Catholic teacher has to do with "text-books" the better for him. Text-books are sure to be Protestant. At this moment, we believe, the candidates for matriculation at the London University have to be taught English history out of an abridgment of Hume. Then, as the teacher enters higher regions, and approaches logic, mental philosophy, morals, and the like, he must expect to find fresh and greater difficulties, which he may fairly think insurmountable. The elder Universities do not, perhaps, distinctly require a logic and a philosophy which Catholic teachers can only handle for the purpose of refutation, but it must be expected that the examination and the judgment of the examiners, if they are Protestants of the latter half of the nineteenth century, will be coloured in no slight degree by anti-Catholic doctrines. Something might perhaps be said in favour of an examination in which Aristotle and Butler are, if not text-books, at least the substantial foundations of the knowledge that is required, but it is difficult to speak with any degree of confidence unless we can

first ascertain the dominant philosophy which practically possesses the minds of the majority of teachers and pupils in a given University. Here, then, the Catholic teacher will be driven-indeed he practically is driven at presentto teach what is not examined in, to separate his own training from the training of the University to whose examinations he looks forward, and to look upon the degree, not as the final test of all that he has been labouring over, but as a sort of decoration for a part— and that not always the most important part of the knowledge he has been instilling into his pupils. And, in the supposed case of the impossibility of allowing Catholic students in philosophy, for instance, to be examined and tested by Protestant examiners, and to prepare Protestant systems of philosophy for the purposes of the examination, the Catholic teacher will certainly prefer that one among Protestant Universities which will give him the degree on other points and on the best terms. That is, he will prefer a University which separates philosophy and history from classics, mathematics, and simple logic, or even from the two first without the last. If London will give him his degree for classics and mathematics, without philosophy, he will prefer London, even though the examination may be encumbered by a few of the "ologies" for which, as an instrument of education, he has not much respect; but if London will not do it, and if Cambridge or Oxford will-as Cambridge, at least, would at the present moment, if only the necessity of residence was not insisted on there, as it is not insisted on at London-then, on the plainest and simplest grounds of prudence and common sense, the Catholic teacher will prefer Oxford or Cambridge to London. These, then, are the elements into which the question of alternatives resolves itself. If we are to purchase an examination and a degree out of our own community, we should purchase it in the market most favourable to ourselves, that is, where our own traditions as to subjects are least interfered with, where the choice even of books is most left free to us, where there is the most liberal division among the schools that lead to the degree, so

VOL. XI.

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