of submitting to certain tests of educational
efficiency, and to a conscience clause protecting minorities from
interference with their faith.

A case which once caused much moral heart-burning among good men was the
endowment, by the State, of Maynooth College, which is absolutely under
the control of the Roman Catholic priesthood, and intended to educate
their Divinity students in the Roman Catholic faith. The endowment dated
from the period of the old Irish Protestant Parliament; and when, on the
Disestablishment of the Irish Church, it came to an end, it was replaced
by a large capital grant from the Irish Church Fund, and it is upon the
interest of that grant that the College is still supported. This grant
was denounced by many excellent men on the ground that the State was
Protestant; that it had a definite religious belief upon which it was
bound in conscience to act; and that it was a sinful apostasy to endow
out of the public purse the teaching of what all Protestants believe to
be superstition, and what many Protestants believe to be idolatrous and
soul-destroying error. The strength of this kind of feeling in England
is shown by the extreme difficulty there has been in persuading public
opinion to acquiesce in any form of that concurrent endowment of
religions which exists so widely and works so well upon the Continent.

Many, again, who have no objection to the policy of assisting by State
subsidies the theological education of the priests are of opinion that
it is extremely injurious both to the State and to the young that the
secular education--and especially the higher secular education--of the
Irish Catholic population should be placed under their complete control,
and that, through their influence, the Irish Catholics should be
strictly separated during the period of their education from their
fellow-countrymen of other religions. No belief, in my own opinion, is
better founded than this. If, however, those who hold it find that there
is a great body of Catholic parents who persistently desire this control
and separation; who will not be satisfied with any removal of
disabilities and sectarian influence in systems of common education; who
object to all mixed and undenominational education on the ground that
their priests have condemned it, and that they are bound in conscience
to follow the orders of their priests, and who are in consequence
withholding from their children the education they would othe