day--that we took all the splendid endowments of Oxford,
Cambridge, and so forth, from Roman Catholics; which being so, we are
bound to make some restoration of the spoils to the Catholics of this day.
Was there ever heard more complex absurdity? Mark its stages:

1st, If you _had_ taken them from Catholics of the 16th century, how would
_that_ translate any interest of property in the institutions to people of
the nineteenth century, simply as professing the same faith? We took
various spoils about 1780 from Hyder Ali, the sultan of Mysore: in 1799 we
took others more costly from his son Tippoo: will that entitle some prince
of Turkestan, or Bokhara, in the year 2000, to claim these spoils on the
plea that he is a Mahometan? An interest of inheritance would thus be
vested in the emptiest of abstractions.

2d, They were _not_ Catholics, in a proper sense, who founded the chief
colleges at Oxford, &c. The Roman Catholic faith was not developed fully
at the period when many were founded: it could not be developed even as a
_religious system_, until after the great polemic writers, on the one side
and the other, had drawn out the differential points of doctrine. And when
partly developed, or showing a tendency to certain conclusions, it was not
fully _settled_ until the Council of Trent. Next, as a _political
interest_, it was not at all developed until between the beginning of
Luther and the termination of Trent. Impossible it was that it should; for
until a counter-pole existed, until an antagonist interest had arisen,
the relations of Popery, whether political or religious, must have been
indeterminate: as a kingdom surrounded by deserts and trackless forests,
cannot have its frontier line ascertained.

3dly, If they had been Catholics, in the _fullest_ sense, who founded our
Universities, it was not _as_ Catholics that they founded them, but as
great families who had accumulated property under our system of laws; and
secondly, as natives of the land. They were _able_ to found universities,
because they had been protected by English laws; they were _willing_ to
found universities, because they were of English birth, and loved their
native land. The Countess of Richmond, for instance, or Henry VI., in his
great foundations at Eton or Cambridge, or Baliol at Oxford, did not think
of Popery under any relation to heresy. They thought of it, so far as _at
all_ they thought of it, in its general abstraction of spiritual
lov