tery, the Jewish Bourse; instead of Christian almsgiving, the Malthusian poorhouse; instead of Christian foundations devoted to God's service and the poor, we have five thousand millions of pounds sterling of public debt crushing down the productive forces of civilization, but gorging the financial cormorants of the world; instead of the Christian use of riches as means to the higher life, and as aids to the weaker or less fortunate brethren, we have the unbridled pursuit of wealth for its own sake, and for the gratification of a hard and sensual egotism; instead of the Christian prohibition of usury-that cancer of industrial life—we have the rationalist exaltation of usury; instead of the supremacy of the Christian Faith, we have the supremacy of the Times, the National Zeitung, and the Opinione; in a word, instead of Christianity, we have Modern Liberalism, which means Ancient Paganism over again, only served up with printing and gunpowder.

They do right who make the French Revolution of 1789 the starting point of a new age of anti-Christian re-action ; but this new era was introduced by the Lutheran interruption of the development of Europe, and was precipitated by the teachings of the rationalist or liberalist school of Political Economists, and both the sectarian and the economic impulse was mainly communicated to the Continent from Great Britain. Of course there were French Huguenots and French Economists, but just as we properly connect Voltaire with Scotch and English tutorings, so we may trace the entire anti-Christian, and fundamentally anti-economic policy, not only of France, but of Europe at large, to the principles drawn from a dozen sources, developed with rare intelligence, and formulated with a rationalistic power which contained in itself the germ of all later growths, by the Scotch thinker, Adam Smith. It may be freely admitted that the ground was well prepared. Gallicanism, and Jansenism, and Austrian Josephism, and Portuguese Pombalism had contributed to reduce Christianity on the Continent to a condition of disintegration, which gave ample opportunity for the new and vigorous rationalism to propagate itself. It was quite enough for the production of this result that the education of Europe had been deliberately corrupted by the governments of almost every Catholic land; for in the absence of Christian instruction, Economic Science shared the fate of every other branch of Christian philosophy. Adam Smith—a well-meaning and acute observer from a rationalist standpoint of the phenomena of public society— constructed his system on the principles which would, perhaps, most readily occur to a rationalist philanthropist. Naturally recognising in riches the object of all material pursuits and the means of all material enjoyments, he made the acquisi

tion of wealth the proper subject of economic inquiry. As his Protestant conception of religion could contemplate nothing beyond a debate of private judgments, so his rationalist conception of society could contemplate nothing beyond the competition of individual self-interests. He disintegrated industrial humanity as Luther and Calvin had disintegrated Christendom, and in their true spirit he bade the economic world of the future arise, if it could, in harmony and beneficence, from the unbridled, unrestrained, unguided conflict of individual wants, individual cupidities, individual ambitions, all tending and striving towards the acquisition of the great master-key to all sensual satisfactions-wealth, wealth, wealth! The perception of wants, the multiplication of wants, the satisfaction of wants, these were the stages and aims of economic exertion and material civilization. Seeing that competition was one incentive to human industry, and unable to acknowledge anything beyond, he set all men competing, and logically awarded the prizes of the industrial conflict to the victors who had proved themselves by their victory to have been the most calculating and deserving. If demand exceeded supply, so much the worse for the demanders. If supply exceeded demand, so much the worse for supply. If an industrial class fell to the ground, and was trodden on in the dire combat, their fall proved that they had found their proper place in the social system. If another industrial class, or what ought to have been an industrial class, rose to the surface, and not only to the surface, but to supremacy, their rise demonstrated their use and their merit. As each individual was the best judge of his own interests, it followed inexorably that the place in which each individual found himself at each moment of the industrial progress, was precisely the place where he ought to be. As wealth, the great object of everybody's endeavour, distributed itself in society exactly according to the efficacy of the individual means devoted to its accumulation, it followed that the rich became rich in virtue of a law of nature, and that the poor would have been rich if they had been able. In such a scheme, of course, Christian charity could have no place, since misery itself was but the well deserved retribution for economic backwardness, for deficient recognition of the economic gospel of supply and demand. Adam-Smithism was an anticipation of the Darwinian struggle for life, introduced into the universal sphere of economic society, and unflinchingly applied to every condition of economic development. "Give free scope to individual endeavour," said the great founder of Liberalist economy, "and whatever results is right." The same maxim underlay the old Pagan constitutions for the expropriation of man by his fellow-man. It was very

well to talk of free scope for individual endeavour. When all the natural superiorities and privileges, all the keenest wits and hardest hearts of a society had been directed in this aim for three or four generations, and when the result had been, as it has been, the formation of a hundred-fold superior, hundred-fold privileged class of social oligarchs, monopolizing at once all the means of production and all the means of enjoyment, what becomes of "the free scope for individual endeavour?" If the weaker were driven to the wall during the earlier stages, when the strong were only becoming stronger, and were not as yet so definitely the strongest, what chance or hope is there for the weaker being able, at any subsequent period, to redress the crushing inequality of the Liberalist economic scale? And who are the weaker? It is an awful thought, but it is a still more awful fact. The weaker in this case, the crushed and vanquished in this unequal combat-let us dare to say it even in the face of the nineteenth century-are Humanity minus the modern privileged classes.

Gentlemen, competition is good, and the law of supply and demand is good, but there is more in man's nature, and in the providential laws to which it has been subjected, than has been dreamed of in the Rationalist Economy.

ON SOME OBJECTIONS TO TRINITY COLLEGE AS A PLACE OF EDUCATION FOR CATHOLICS.

THE general principle of Mixed Education has been so

emphatically and so repeatedly condemned by the Churchby individual Bishops, by Synods and Councils, by the Supreme Pastor-that no one can now pretend, that it is any longer open to Catholics to maintain its lawfulness. When we consider what was formerly the condition of education and society in these islands, it is quite intelligible how good men and sincere Catholics can have looked upon Mixed Education as something suitable to their circumstances, or, at all events, something indifferent and to be tolerated, like a fashion in garments, which, however personally distasteful, may not be objected to on the score of morality. But this state of things has quite passed away. Ignorance, or simple "wrong-headedness," might have accounted for it and excused its bona fides sixty or seventy years ago. Mere perversity of will, that is, a consciously disobedient spirit, can alone account for it in our day. No honest, well-instructed Catholic can now be duped into the notion, that Mixed Education may be lawfully upheld.

Trinity College, Dublin, has been, for the last eighty years, the special home of Mixed Education in Ireland. In some respects, too, it has been a splendid home. The greater number of Irish Catholics who have made their way to civil honours within this century, have been its alumni. Sheil, Wyse, Sir Michael O'Loghlen, Woulfe, Ball, the late Chief Baron, not to mention many still living, achieved distinction in "Old Trinity" before they carved a name for themselves in the outside world. For nearly a quarter of a century the Queen's Colleges drew off attention from this characteristic of Trinity College; and in the fight which has been going on for all those years between the defenders of Catholic education and its opponents, the battle has chiefly raged around the "Godless Colleges," and it has usually been only by accident, that the interests of the older institution have become enveloped in the fray. But, the proceedings of the last two years, and especially of the last few months, have effectually dissipated any haziness that may have been gathering around the foundation of Elizabeth. The latest developments of its "usefulness," the enlargement of its basis and powers, the extension of its governing body, the singular "liberality" which has thrown. open all its dignities, emoluments, and endowments to every one, without "religious distinction"-all these things place it once more in the fore front in the public eye, as the home, the type, and the embodiment of the principle of Mixed Education in our land. Three hundred years ago, Trinity College was founded by an English Queen, to wean the Irish people from the religion of the Pope, by educating them in ways more in harmony with the temper of the times than the ways of the old Faith. The story of the last three hundred years tells how the Irish people availed themselves of the means so liberally provided for their conversion to Protestantism. Now-when the temper of the times has grown still less tolerant of even the semblance and outward garment of Christianity than it was in the sixteenth century, and men have set themselves to efface, if possible, from the human conscience the notion of sin and of redemption, and the name of God, together with the prerogatives of his Vicar-Trinity College has aroused herself to a sense of the importance of the hour, and has again stepped down into the arena to assail, and, if it may be, to overthrow the Faith which God has given to our people, through the Apostle, whom his Vicar commissioned to preach to our forefathers. She has refurbished the old weapons of her armoury, and she has forged new ones; and, making a solemn profession of the new code of dogmas, she has successfully petitioned another English Queen to set her hand to a new

Charter, which decrees, that henceforth the name of God shall disappear from every official act and declaration of the College. Will anyone say, that Mixed Education, in this its latest development, is not an evil to be shunned, but rather a good thing to be cherished?

Although this is a capital objection against any education which Trinity College might offer, eclipsing to the Catholic mind every advantage which she might otherwise present, and placing an impassable gulf between the Catholic heart and any appeals which she may address to it for support; it is not, by any means, the only objection of a serious character. It has, however, so happened, that those other objections, which we may call objections of detail, or of fact, have not attracted the attention which they deserve. The minds of men have naturally been running on the capital objection. Like the astronomers, whose field of view contracts in proportion to its distinctness, those who have condemned Trinity College upon principle, have not cared to examine the details of an education which they censure as a whole; while, on the other hand, those who have upheld that education as a whole, have not been, perhaps, desirous of scrutinizing it too closely, lest they might be coerced into rejecting it piecemeal. Now, there is something of unwisdom on both sides. They who oppose Trinity College might, if they investigated her educational processes, find something to admire and discover something useful; they would certainly, as we have already said, have been able to bring to light grave reasons of detail, in support of their own radical objection, which could not fail to make a deep impression on every honest mind. Those who defend it, and uphold the principle upon which it rests, are not, surely, prepared to insist that this principle can gild every defect, and that an abuse, however great, becomes laudable when associated with Mixed Education.

We have it in purpose to invite attention to one or two of these objections, which, as it seems to us, are of special point with respect to Catholics. Their consideration is the less difficult, because they are objections of fact, which cannot be explained away by any theory. They are evils which, we frankly admit, might, in the abstract, exist in a Catholic educational institution, but which could only exist there as an abuse, and through grievous and culpable negligence. If, however, they did exist in a Catholic institution, there would also exist side by side with them-unless the place were in very deed a whited sepulchre and spiritual charnel-housepowerful antidotes which, if they did not wholly neutralize the baneful effects of those evils, would, at least, diminish and counteract them to an appreciable extent.