When the Catholic University is mentioned, we hear people saying on all sides of us,—“Impossible! how can you give degrees? what will your degrees be worth? where are your endowments? where are your edifices? where will you find students? what will government have to say to you? who wants you? who will acknowledge you? what do you expect? what is left for you?”
Now, I hope I may say without offence, that this surprise on the part of so many excellent men, is itself not a little surprising. When I look around at what the Catholic Church now is in this country of Ireland, and am told what it was twenty or thirty years ago; when I see the hundreds of good works, which in that interval have been done, and now stand as monuments of the zeal and charity of the living and the dead; when I find that in those years new religious orders have been introduced, and that the country is now covered with convents; when I gaze upon the sacred edifices, spacious and fair, which during that time have been built out of the pence of the poor; when I reckon up the multitude of schools now at work, and the sacrifices which gave them birth; when I reflect upon the great political exertions and successes which have made the same period memorable in all history to come; when I contrast what was then almost a nation of bondsmen, with the intelligence, and freedom of thought, and hope for the future, which is its present characteristic; when I meditate on the wonderful sight of a people springing again fresh and vigorous from the sepulchre of famine and pestilence; and when I consider that those bonds of death which they have burst, are but the specimen and image of the adamantine obstacles, political, social, and municipal, which have all along stood in the way of their triumphs, and how they have been carried on to victory by the simple energy of a courageous faith; it sets me marvelling to find some of those very men, who have been heroically achieving impossibilities all their lives long, now beginning to scruple about adding one little sneaking impossibility to the list, and I feel it to be a great escape for the Church that they did not insert the word “impossible” into their dictionaries and encyclopedias at a somewhat earlier date.
However, this by the way: as to the objection itself, which has led to this not unnatural reflection, perhaps the reader may have observed, if he has taken the trouble to follow me, that in what I have said above I have already been covertly aiming at it; and now I propose to handle it avowedly, at least as far as my limits will allow in one Chapter.
He will recollect, perhaps, that in former Chapters I have already been maintaining, that a University consists, and has ever consisted, in demand and supply, in wants which it alone can satisfy and which it does satisfy, in the communication of knowledge, and the relation and bond which exists between the teacher and the taught. Its constituting, animating principle is this moral attraction of one class of persons to another; which is prior in its nature, nay commonly in its history, to any other tie whatever; so that, where this is wanting, a University is alive only in name, and has lost its true essence, whatever be the advantages, whether of position or of affluence, with which the civil power or private benefactors contrive to encircle it. I am far indeed from undervaluing those external advantages; a certain share of them is necessary to its well-being: but on the whole, as it is with the individual, so will it be with the body:—it is talents and attainments which command success. Consideration, dignity, wealth, and power, are all very proper things in the territory of literature; but they ought to know their place; they come second, not first; they must not presume, or make too much of themselves, or they had better be away. First intellect, then secular advantages, as its instruments and as its rewards; I say no more than this, but I say no less.
Nor am I denying, as I shall directly show, that, under any circumstances, professors will ordinarily lecture, and students ordinarily attend them, with a view, in some shape or other, to secular advantage. Certainly; few persons pursue knowledge simply for its own sake. But though remuneration of some sort, both to the teachers and to the taught, may be inseparable from the fact of a University, still it may be separable from its idea. Much less am I forgetting (to view the subject on another side), that intellect is helpless, because ungovernable and self-destructive, unless it be regulated by a moral rule and by revealed truth. Nor am I saying anything in disparagement of the principle, that establishments of literature and science should be in subordination to ecclesiastical authority.
I would not make light of any of these considerations; some I shall even assume at once, as necessary for the purpose; of some I shall say more hereafter; here, however, I am merely suggesting to the reader’s better judgment what constitutes a University, what is just enough to constitute it, or what a University consists in, viewed in its essence. What this is, seems to me most simply explained and ascertained, as I noticed in a former Chapter, by the instance of metropolitan centres. It would appear as if the very same kinds of need, social and moral, which give rise to a metropolis, give rise also to a University; nay, that every metropolis is a University, as far as the rudiments of a University are concerned. Youths come up thither from all parts, in order to better themselves generally;—not as if they necessarily looked for degrees in their own several pursuits, and degrees recognized by the law; not as if there were to be any competition for fellowships in chemistry, for instance, or engineering,—but they come to gain that instruction which will turn most to their account in after life, and to form good and serviceable connexions, and that, as regards the fine arts, literature, and science, as well as in trade and the professions. I do not see why it should be more difficult for Ireland to trade, if I may use the term, upon the field of knowledge, than for the inhabitants of San Francisco or of Melbourne to make a fortune by their gold fields, or by the North of England by its coal. If gold is power, wealth, influence; and if coal is power, wealth, influence; so is knowledge.