Catholic form.

What are these advantages? I repeat, they are in one word the culture of
the intellect. Robbed, oppressed, and thrust aside, Catholics in these
islands have not been in a condition for centuries to attempt the sort of
education which is necessary for the man of the world, the statesman, the
landholder, or the opulent gentleman. Their legitimate stations, duties,
employments, have been taken from them, and the qualifications withal,
social and intellectual, which are necessary both for reversing the
forfeiture and for availing themselves of the reversal. The time is come
when this moral disability must be removed. Our desideratum is, not the
manners and habits of gentlemen;--these can be, and are, acquired in
various other ways, by good society, by foreign travel, by the innate
grace and dignity of the Catholic mind;--but the force, the steadiness, the
comprehensiveness and the versatility of intellect, the command over our
own powers, the instinctive just estimate of things as they pass before
us, which sometimes indeed is a natural gift, but commonly is not gained
without much effort and the exercise of years.

This is real cultivation of mind; and I do not deny that the
characteristic excellences of a gentleman are included in it. Nor need we
be ashamed that they should be, since the poet long ago wrote, that
"Ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes Emollit mores." Certainly a liberal
education does manifest itself in a courtesy, propriety, and polish of
word and action, which is beautiful in itself, and acceptable to others;
but it does much more. It brings the mind into form,--for the mind is like
the body. Boys outgrow their shape and their strength; their limbs have to
be knit together, and their constitution needs tone. Mistaking animal
spirits for vigour, and over-confident in their health, ignorant what they
can bear and how to manage themselves, they are immoderate and
extravagant; and fall into sharp sicknesses. This is an emblem of their
minds; at first they have no principles laid down within them as a
foundation for the intellect to build upon: they have no discriminating
convictions, and no grasp of consequences. And therefore they talk at
random, if they talk much, and cannot help being flippant, or what is
emphatically called "_young_." They are merely dazzled by phenomena,
instead of perceiving things as they are.

It were well if none remained boys all their lives; but what is more
common