age which admires them.
Protestants, however, may do as they will: it is a matter for their own
consideration; but at least it concerns us that our own literary tribunals
and oracles of moral duty should bear a graver character. At least it is a
matter of deep solicitude to Catholic Prelates that their people should be
taught a wisdom, safe from the excesses and vagaries of individuals,
embodied in institutions which have stood the trial and received the
sanction of ages, and administered by men who have no need to be
anonymous, as being supported by their consistency with their predecessors
and with each other.

_November 21. 1852._

UNIVERSITY TEACHING.

Discourse I.

Introductory.

1.

In addressing myself, Gentlemen, to the consideration of a question which
has excited so much interest, and elicited so much discussion at the
present day, as that of University Education, I feel some explanation is
due from me for supposing, after such high ability and wide experience
have been brought to bear upon it, that any field remains for the
additional labours either of a disputant or of an inquirer. If,
nevertheless, I still venture to ask permission to continue the
discussion, already so protracted, it is because the subject of Liberal
Education, and of the principles on which it must be conducted, has ever
had a hold upon my own mind; and because I have lived the greater part of
my life in a place which has all that time been occupied in a series of
controversies both domestic and with strangers, and of measures,
experimental or definitive, bearing upon it. About fifty years since, the
English University, of which I was so long a member, after a century of
inactivity, at length was roused, at a time when (as I may say) it was
giving no education at all to the youth committed to its keeping, to a
sense of the responsibilities which its profession and its station
involved, and it presents to us the singular example of an heterogeneous
and an independent body of men, setting about a work of self-reformation,
not from any pressure of public opinion, but because it was fitting and
right to undertake it. Its initial efforts, begun and carried on amid many
obstacles, were met from without, as often happens in such cases, by
ungenerous and jealous criticisms, which, at the very moment that they
were urged, were beginning to be unjust. Controversy did but bring out
more c