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government offered them a university without theology, philosophy, or
history, and that they refused it. But the world in general does not desire universities with theology, philosophy, and history left out; no more did
Ireland. They are told that Trinity College, Dublin, is now an unsectarian university no more Protestant than Catholic, and that they may use Trinity College. But the teaching in Trinity College is, and long will be (and very naturally), for the most part in the hands of Protestants; the whole character, tradition, and atmosphere of the place are Protestant. The Irish Catholics want
to have on their side, too, a place where the university teaching is mainly in
the hands of Catholics, and of which the character and atmosphere shall be Catholic. But then they are asked whether they propose to do away with
all the manifold and deep-rooted results of Protestant ascendancy in Ireland,
and they are warned that this would be a hard, nay, impossible matter.
But they are not proposing anything so enormous and chimerical as to do
away with all the results of Protestant ascendancy; they propose merely to
put an end to one particular and very cruel result of it: - the result that they,
the immense majority of the Irish people, have no university, while the Protestants in Ireland, the small minority, have one.

Arnold concludes that the Irish demand has not been met for the reason
that British non-conformist sentiment would not allow any government
to meet it. To the very end of the United Kingdom, this obstacle was
never fully overcome.

Meanwhile, under the leardership of their Bishops, the Irish people
attempted to provide themselves with what the State denied them.
When the Bishops assembled at Thurles in 1850, they had before them
more than one hopeful example. The Catholic University of Louvain,
founded in 1835, was already an evident success; and the Catholic
universities of America, to a great extent created by the emigrant Irish,
had made a fair beginning. Ireland, indeed, was not prosperous Belguim
or expanding America. And yet, in spite of the recent Famine and the
draining of the country by emigration, and although there was no
wealth in Catholic hands to endow a private university, and the Catholic
middle class, from which students might be drawn, was barely struggling
into existence, the Bishops and people nevertheless bravely trusted in
the future.

It was both a bold and a brilliant decision on the part of the Bishops
when they invited one of Oxford's greatest sons, lately converted to
Catholicism, to be Rector of the new university. Not less remarkable

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were the courage and generosity with which John Henry Newman
accepted his strange assignment. The Catholic University of Ireland,
which opened its doors in 1854, has since then often been called
Newman's University; and University College lately gave his name
to the houses in St. Stephen's Green which were the main centre of
the University's work.

The enterprise of the Catholic University would perhaps have been
justified if it had borne no other fruit than those inaugural lectures which Newman wrote to expound his plan for the new institution; later
enlarged into The Idea of a University, these lectures have influenced
the philosophy of higher education throughout the world. Valuable
too are his weekly essays in the University's Gazette, now known as
the University Sketches.

The Catholic University is sometimes spoken of as though it had
been a platform for Newman and nothing more. Certainly that
University was a thing of strange contrasts. Its income was made up
of the shillings and pence of the poor, collected annually at the church
doors - a thing to which there cannot be many parallels in the history
of universities. Thus there was on one side the eloquence of Oxford's
finest culture, setting forth the perfect idea of a university; on the
other, the devotion and self-sacrifice of a people struggling out of
misery, and only knowing vaguely what a university was. But
Newman himself saw the contrast; he was not daunted by it but set
himself to the task of resolving it. He did not attempt an impossible
Oxford on Irish soil, but a university to meet the Irish need. "The old
names of the Irish race," he said, "are mounting up into status and
power. . . We consider the Catholic University to be the event
of the day in this gradual majestic resurrection of the nation and its
religion." When students came only in small numbers, he was not
dismayed - "the supply must come before the demand, though not
before the need." Two things may be mentioned to show how Newman
fitted the University to Irish reality. One is his creation of a Chair of
Irish Antiquities, the first in any University, and his appointment thereto
of the famous Eugene O'Curry. The other is his provision for scientific
and professional studies - a remarkable step on the part of the great
defender of liberal education. The University's lack of a charter and of

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