COLLEGE OF MAYNOOTH.

SPEECH MADE IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS APRIL 4, 1845, ON SIR ROBERT PEEL'S MOTION FOR LIBERTY TO BRING IN A BILL TO AMEND THE ACTS RELATING TO THE COLLEGE OF MAYNOOTH.

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I RISE to move the adjournment [loud cries of "go on,' no, no"]. The hour is so late that I shall hardly be able to proceed [go on, go on]. I must, I see, obey the injunctions of the house, and therefore I shall go on as well as I am able. It were unjust on the part of any Irish Catholic to withhold a tribute of unqualified panegyric from the great measure proposed by the right honourable gentleman, and from the spirit in which it is propounded. He can have no motive but the honourable one of doing service to both countries; and he will, I trust, secure the gratitude of the one, and, notwithstanding a temporary clamour, his objects will, ere long, be justly estimated by the other. The grant to Maynooth is large. The substitution of a permanent legislative endowment for an annual parliamentary donation, is attended with two advantages; first, the periodical recurrence of a discussion in which religious antipathies find a vent will be avoided. Gentlemen with strong theological addictions, must henceforth seek relief in a celebrated spot of pious gathering in the Strand, and must avail themselves of that exceedingly commodious, and far more appropriate medium of evacuation. In this regard, the proposition of the right honourable gentleman is most commendable; but it is still more important that fixity of tenure should be given by an act of parliament to a great Catholic establishment. Maynooth is converted into an institution, and is placed on the same footing, as the rest of your national incorporations. You are taking a step in a right direction. You are advancing in a career of which you have left the starting-post far behind, and of which the goal, perhaps, is not far distant. You must not take the Catholic clergy into your pay, but you can take the Catholic Church under your care. You can build houses of worship, and grant glebe houses, upon a secure and irrevocable title. The perfect independence of the Catholic clergy is indispensable. A stipend at pleasure, and which the crown could call back, would be odious. An honourable relation—a relation honourable to both-may be established between the Catholic Church and the state, but you must never think of exacting from that church an ignominious complaisance. I am well aware that there exists in this country great objections to Maynooth, but those objections are in a

great part connected with defects, of which the correction is not difficult those defects, indeed, arise in a great degree from the niggard spirit in which you have doled out a wretched pittance to Maynooth, utterly incommensurate with its wants. I am not astonished that a Scotch volunteer should entertain an antipathy to Maynooth; but it is matter to me of some surprise that it should be an object of anti-, pathy to an English Conservative in the true sense of a phrase often misapplied. Maynooth was founded in a great measure at the suggestion of the apostle of order, the great Edmund Burke. Let him be assured that he has made great progress in the art of governing Ireland, by whom the works of Edmund Burke are perused with admiration. That sagacious man saw that it was not the interest of Protestant England that the priesthood of Catholic Ireland should be educated in France: he thought that evils could arise from a French and Irish ecclesiastical fraternization: he did not wish that French principles should be imported into every Irish parish, and he denounced the introduction of a Gallo-Hibernian establishment into Ireland. Edmund Burke was of opinion that the Irish Catholic priesthood should be educated by the state for the state. It has been sometimes observed that the Irish priest of the old regime had, by his continental education, acquired a deportment of a superior kind. I believe this notion is, to a great degree, a mistaken one. There were, of course, several ecclesiastics of the old school, of accomplished manners; but Farquhar, the Irish dramatist, who knew his countrymen, represents Foigard as a graduate of the University of Lovain. The priests of Maynooth are not the coarse-minded men which they have been represented to be; many of them are superior to the dignitaries of your own establishment; but we do not want fine gentlemen for the hard services of the Irish Catholic church. I have heard it observed that the deportment of the Irish Catholic priesthood has occasioned the alienation of the Irish Protestant proprietors. That alienation, however, has its origin in political far more than in social causes. As long as the priest was subservient at the hustings, he was welcome in the drawing-room. The separation of the gentry and the priesthood arises from a succession of political struggles-from the Catholic question, from the tithe question, from the municipal question, from the registration question-a question of which the settlement cannot be final, unless it be just.. Give the Catholic priest and the Irish Protestant proprietor a common interest in maintaining the institutions of their country, and their reconciliation will be immediate and complete; indeed, the only danger to be apprehended is, that their alliance may become too unqualified and too compact. I con

ceive it to be clear that the maintenance of Maynooth is matter of contract of contract, to be explained in the spirit of legislative equity, and not of scholastic disputation. Maynooth is sustained by two statutes which preceded the Union, ratified by forty-five years of annual grant. If it be matter of contract, the question at once arises whether the sum hitherto voted is adequate to the purposes for which it is designed. That question is to be tried, by considering the extraordinary change which the country has undergone a change to be always kept in mind by those who consider the principles upon which the government of Ireland is to be carried on. I do not know of any instance of so great a national metamorphosis. Population is doubled, but the increase of population does not afford a just measure of the astonishing moral and political transition through which the country has passed. When Maynooth was founded, there were not more than two or three Catholic barristers in Ireland. We have seen a Catholic Chief Baron, a Catholic Master of the Rolls, and four Roman Catholics holding the high office of Attorney-General in Ireland. When Maynooth was founded, no Roman Catholic was admissible to parliament. The majority of Irish members are now returned by Roman Catholic constituencies. When Maynooth was founded, there was not a single Roman Catholic in an Irish corporation. We have now the preponderance in almost every corporation in the country. When Maynooth was founded, the great mass of the people were destitute of the elements of education, and now you can scarce meet a peasant upon a public road, who cannot read, and write, and count; and men who read, and write, and count, cannot fail to think. Under these circumstances of marvellous mutation, is the Catholic priest to remain sta

tionary in instruction? And in the great revolution through which the country is revolving, shall not the Catholic Church be carried on with it ? If it be clear that the augmented grant to Maynooth is just, it seems to me to be equally clear that it is in the highest degree expedient. It will be essentially beneficial to Ireland, and whatever is beneficial to one country must be serviceable to the other. Great ability will be allured into Maynooth-gold for genius has a magnetic power. The professorships of Maynooth will be filled by men of great talents, and great erudition. A general improvement will be the necessary result. Locate in every parish an educated Catholic priest, whose mind has undergone the process of literary refinement, and you will accomplish much in the work of national amelioration. But the advantages resulting from this measure are so obvious, that it is perhaps better that I should address myself to the objections which are pressed against it. It is said that Catholics and Protestants are to

be educated together. With respect to the laity, that observation is, perhaps, a just one; but in every country in Europe, men destined for the Catholic Church are educated in ecclesiastical seminaries, and educated apart. The strictest discipline, habits of subordination almost passive, and a total abstinence from sensual indulgence of every kind are indispensable amongst those who are educated for the priesthood of the Catholic Church. Four years passed in Trinity College, Dublin, would constitute a bad apprenticeship for the confessional. The Catholic priesthood are now not only pure, but unsuspected, and where interests of such importance are at stake, no empirical experiments should be tried. It has been alleged that at Maynooth students of very humble parentage are gathered in a mass of unmixed rusticity, and each individual contributes his quota of contamination. It is a great mistake to imagine that the students of Maynooth are men of such low origin. It is to the middle classes that they generally belong, as is stated in the document read to-night by the right honourable baronet, and which emanated from the Catholic bishops of Ireland. For my part, I am not anxious to see the younger sons of the Catholic gentry enter in large numbers into the Catholic Church. The duties of a Roman Catholic priest are so severe, that men cradled in luxuries are scarcely fit for their discharge. It ought to be borne in mind that some of the greatest ornaments of the Catholic Church have always come from what I might call the Apostolic order. The Catholic Church has a sort of ennobling influence, and the consciousness of spiritual authority often imparts dignity to those who are not highly born. How often in the olden time did the mitred plebeian stand erect before the Norman baron, and in the cause of the serf and of the peasant, with the crosier turn aside the lance. It is the boast of your own Anglo-Catholic pontificate that some of the greatest of your divines have risen from the humblest gradations to the highest episcopal dignities. A man as lowly born as Wolsey may, under your reformed system, become the Archbishop of Canterbury, and take precedence of men who to the conquest of England trace back their descent.

It has been suggested that it is unreasonable to put the people of this country to the cost of educating the priesthood of Ireland; and my honourable friend the member for Sheffield has intimated an intention to postpone the additional grant to Maynooth, until a fund to be derived by some posterior arrangement, from the superfluities of the Irish Protestant Church, shall have been created. I have the utmost value for the opinions of my honourable friend, and listen to all he says, upon this or any other subject, with the most unaffected respect; but he will permit me to observe, that

it would not be reasonable, to procrastinate a measure so obviously equitable, as he will be the first to admit this to be, and he ought not to insist upon the delay of what he knows to be justice to one church, until he shall have succeeded in inflicting what he considers to be injustice upon the other. Even if the sum proposed to be granted were five-fold, what the minister recommends you to concede, there is so much true economy in the results of wise legislation, that your very love of saving should induce you to act with liberality to Ireland. Are not lectures at Maynooth cheaper than state prosecutions? Are not professors less costly than Crown Solicitors? Is not a large standing army, and a great constabulary force, more expensive than the moral police with which, by the priesthood of Ireland, you can be thriftily and efficaciously supplied? The last objection to which I shall advert is the familiar one, that you ought not to become contributary to the propagation of what you take upon yourselves, with some assumption of infallibility, to be the untruth. It should be remembered by those who make this objection, that principal is entirely independent of amount. If to grant £26,000 is a mortal sin to grant £9,000, even in the opinion of an Oxonian casuist, ought not to be considered as a venial offence. The same observation applies to all the contributions annually made for the maintenance of the Catholic Church in our colonial dependencies, and to which the First Lord of the Treasury referred with so much distinctness. But, independently of these considerations, is it not most injudicious, and what is far worse, is it not most Anti-Christian to tell seven millions of your fellow-citizens that their religion is idolatrous, and their creed is but an avenue to perdition ? For my part, I hear these unchristian impunities with Christian forbearance; I do not permit my equanimity to be disturbed, by what I consider to be the bad argument, and the profane scurrilities which are directed against the Catholic religion. When I consider the grounds upon which that religion rests-when I see its doctrines coeval with the foundation of Christianity, and maintained by the authority of the fathers who have written, and the martyrs who have died for their sustainment-when I see that for so many centuries the faith of the Catholic Church has by a wonderful apostolical succession been preserved unbroken-when I see heresy after heresy decay, while the Catholic Church remains immutable and predominant, fulfilling the prediction, that no unearthly power of evil shall prevail against it when I see it rising in providential resuscitation in those countries, in which it was supposed to have been so deeply interred, that, excepting by some interposition more than human,