the examination than to the cultivation of the intellectual powers and the formation of character: a subject is not studied in a broad and comprehensive manner: and the student's energies are cramped." And the Report says And the Report says "that it is well known that the greater part of the higher degrees are conferred on the performance of exercises which are merely nominal."

We conclude this point by the summing up of a leading London organ of the last evidence given by Dr. Liddell, Dean of Christ Church, before Mr. Ewart's Select Committee. The passage has been reproduced by other organs of the press:

His evidence fully confirms the worst that any opponents of University monopolies have ever alleged as to the evil effects of the present system. Twenty-five years ago the abuses of the educational system at both one and the other University were disgraceful enough; but there is now the positive testimony of Dean Liddell, the head of the largest and most distinguished house at Oxford, to the effect that of late years education at his University has been degraded, and that it is even now in process of degeneration. One cannot regret this; it is only the result which was to be anticipated from the maintenance of a bad system, opposed to the ideas of the time, identified with the retrograde political notions of a decaying faction. One is not surprised that the best class of Oxford graduates, the most distinguished scholars whom the University has of late years produced, the "double-firsts" of her class lists, now decline to take an active part in the teaching and the practical conduct of the University, or to mix themselves up with a system which they rightly believe to be doomed. It will be so until some steps are taken to popularize these great foundations, to take them out of the hands of narrow sectarian cliques, to make them what they ought to be, the true intellectual centres of the nation.

We add the general verdict of Mr. Jonn Stuart Mill, as expressed in his inaugural speech; a person certainly who has before him larger means of knowledge and experience than we have. He says, "Youths come to the Scottish Universities ignorant, and are there taught. The majority of those who come to the English Universities come still more ignorant, and ignorant they go away" (p. 10 of his Address, &c.).

IV. We now come to our fourth and last criticism upon the Oxford system for a Catholic. It is infinitely the most important, because it touches directly the mainspring of his eternal destiny. It is the religious influence of Oxford upon a youth from a Catholic college.

And we must preface what we have to say by an obvious consideration. Fish out of the salt water and fish out of the fresh cannot thrive together, or even live in the same tank. There is an essential difference in the taste and temperature of

Catholic and non-Catholic society in England. Youths out of these two classes cannot be gathered into the same reservoir to be intellectually and morally fed together, and then turned out each perfect in his way. The reservoir is fed from the salt or the fresh water; but if from both, the fresh water will lose its sweetness.

Now, we are not saying that Catholics are more learned, more intelligent, more active or philanthropic than their fellow-countrymen. We do not say they have no faults and vices, that their lives are not sometimes a scandal to the whole world, that they have not much to guard against and plenty of improvement to make. But we maintain that their standard of supernatural virtue and morality, that their sense of a personal relationship towards God, are altogether different from that of the common mass of their fellow-countrymen. The intellectual attitude and state of feeling educed by the life and certainty of faith, create between them and non-Catholics a gulf wider than could exist between the ordinary Englishman and the ordinary Greek or Roman Pagan.

Contrast the country-house, the home of a Catholic and a non-Catholic family in England. You would suppose they were of different zones. The latter may be busy upon public questions, honourable, fair, gentle in bearing, kind to the poor, and holding it correct to attend Church on Sundays. The former has a chapel in the house, and daily Mass and the constant presence of the Blessed Sacrament. There is the early training from childhood, a tenderly constraining love for the Mother of God, familiarity with spiritual books and lives of Saints, who form an unseen companionship; there is the awakening vocation, perhaps, among sweet, and bright, and playful sisters to a life of perpetual self-immolation; then there is their falling out of the ranks of society, one by one, to seek a life of apostleship, or prayer and penance, in the cloister. And is there not in the mind of a Catholic mother a clear appreciation of the truths of faith, a reverence for the Church of God, a love of the Sacraments, a positive dread of mortal sin for her child, which descends to her like an inheritance of Catholic truth? and are not these the pure voices and controlling influences which form the Catholic child? From her knee-side, from off her neck, her boy leaves her to go to college. There he remains seven or eight years. He plays,

"A boy's business when he goes to school is to learn, that is, to store up things in his memory. For some years his intellect is little more than an instrument for taking in facts, or a receptacle for storing them ; . . . . he has opinions, religious, political, and literary; and, for a boy, is very positive

and studies, and learns; and the industries of Catholic piety and devotion acquired in childhood increase. He grows up, protected from evil, like a plant by the side of fresh waters. Till now his instruction, secular and religious, has kept pace with his years. He is eighteen or nineteen. What is the wrench which we are now anticipating to take place? He is to be sent to a Protestant University. And, note it well, it is just at the time his reasoning powers are coming to perfection, and the spirit of philosophical inquiry is rising spontaneously in his mind, and the desire arises to analyze the nature of his mind, and to understand the rationale of the faith and practice which he imbibed in the confiding trust of childhood. Just at this moment-his first turning-point in life-the crisis, perhaps, he is to be cut adrift from the old moorings; and he is launched into the turbid and troublous waters, which from a thousand polluted sources flow into the Protestant University. Better far were it for a youth of inquiring mind to have been sent while a simple boy to a Protestant school than to be sent to a Protestant semi-rationalist University now that his mind is settling into manhood. Many can bear testimony to this; the late Duke of Norfolk,-who was sent to Cambridge in a time when its religious influence upon the mind was much less active than now, though objectionable religious regulations, since abrogated, were then enforced upon Catholics, never ceased bitterly to regret having been sent to Cambridge till the day of his death.

But what is this University in its religious aspect? It is the natural product and result of the Protestant heresy and of the public and private schools of the country. Many of these schools have been characterized by their own masters as "sinks of iniquity." And the appalling evidence given before the Royal Commission on Public Schools in no way disproves the statement.

It has been said, by a person whom we may not name, but whose authority, gravity, and position in Oxford command the respect of all, that "education in Oxford is infidel to the very core." We are not surprised at the statement.

could it be otherwise?

How

in them and sure about them; but he gets them from his schoolfellows, or his masters, or his parents, as the case may be. It is the seven years of plenty with him; he gathers in by handfuls, like the Egyptians, without counting; and as time goes on, there is exercise for his argumentative powers in the elements of Mathematics, and for his taste in the poets and orators; still, while at school, or, at least, till quite the last years of his time, he acquires, and little more."-Discourse V., Scope and Nature of University Education, by Dr. Newman.

a single proposition in geometry. From this somewhat discreditable statement, it is clear that mathematics are not the intellectual discipline of Oxford; but classics are. Of this we do not complain. But what we desire to point out as a matter for the deepest consideration of Catholic parents and guardians is," that a classical scholar, however eminent in scholarship, is excluded from honours in the Final Examination, unless he has given a considerable time to metaphysics." Mr. Acland laments the "ignorance of common principles and laws of nature," in Oxford, and desires "more security for sound training in exact studies, admitting of definite certainty before young men are plunged into an ocean of doubt about the reality of the faculties, intellectual and moral, with which we are endowed by our Creator." The new system of examinations, he says, "has had the effect of prematurely forcing abstract questions and doubts on minds ill prepared to master them." Note, then, the terrible and radical danger into which every young Catholic, who goes in for honours in classics is at once necessarily plunged. He is obliged to give a considerable time to the Protestant or sceptical or infidel metaphysics of the place; and "he is plunged into an ocean of doubt about the reality of the moral and intellectual faculties," and a thousand other vital questions which arise in metaphysics, and which a Catholic professor alone is properly and safely able to teach. What Oxford professor ever correctly appreciate such writers as Mill, Hamilton, Mansel, Congreve, and the writers of the German school? And these are the works commonly read. What professor ever for a moment dreams of being guided in his investigations and teaching by the light of Revelation and of the Holy See? Here the deadliest poison may be unsuspectedly drunk in. The shipwreck of a Catholic's faith again and again is attributable to his study of unsafe philosophy and metaphysics. This is a question which deserves to be treated at length, but we must pass on to sketch it rather more in the concrete.

Every one has heard of the famous volume of Essays and Reviews. They mark an epoch, and may be considered the starting point for modern Oxford Rationalism. Their disciples in Oxford, Fellows and Undergraduates, have already shot far ahead of their masters. But let us hear the true estimate in which these fascinating modern semi-rationalists are held.

Of Dr. Temple, now Head Master of Rugby, it has been said:"Few men possess in Oxford a higher credit or influence, and none have with more success put themselves at the