learly to its own apprehension the views on which its reformation
was proceeding, and throw them into a philosophical form. The course of
beneficial change made progress, and what was at first but the result of
individual energy and an act of the academical corporation, gradually
became popular, and was taken up and carried out by the separate
collegiate bodies, of which the University is composed. This was the first
stage of the controversy. Years passed away, and then political
adversaries arose against it, and the system of education which it had
established was a second time assailed; but still, since that contest was
conducted for the most part through the medium, not of political acts, but
of treatises and pamphlets, it happened as before that the threatened
dangers, in the course of their repulse, did but afford fuller development
and more exact delineation to the principles of which the University was
the representative.

In the former of these two controversies the charge brought against its
studies was their remoteness from the occupations and duties of life, to
which they are the formal introduction, or, in other words, their
_inutility_; in the latter, it was their connexion with a particular form
of belief, or, in other words, their _religious exclusiveness_.

Living then so long as a witness, though hardly as an actor, in these
scenes of intellectual conflict, I am able to bear witness to views of
University Education, without authority indeed in themselves, but not
without value to a Catholic, and less familiar to him, as I conceive, than
they deserve to be. And, while an argument originating in the
controversies to which I have referred, may be serviceable at this season
to that great cause in which we are here so especially interested, to me
personally it will afford satisfaction of a peculiar kind; for, though it
has been my lot for many years to take a prominent, sometimes a
presumptuous, part in theological discussions, yet the natural turn of my
mind carries me off to trains of thought like those which I am now about
to open, which, important though they be for Catholic objects, and
admitting of a Catholic treatment, are sheltered from the extreme delicacy
and peril which attach to disputations directly bearing on the
subject-matter of Divine Revelation.

2.

There are several reasons why I should open the discussion with a
reference to the lessons with which past years have supplied me. On