its members before it matriculates them. It may here be added, that this time-honoured usurpation and abuse, the old Hebdomadal Board, which every thoughtful person felt could not much longer continue, has, amid the jubilations and thanksgivings of all parties, and with scarcely a sigh or murmur from any quarter whatever, expired ignominiously under the Act passed in the last Session of Parliament, 18 Vict.

As to that Act, however, its history is but a fresh illustration of the foregoing remarks. It did not dare to touch the real seat of existing evils, by restoring or giving jurisdiction to the University over the Colleges, much as it professed to effect in the way of radical reform. And in the passage of the Bill through the House of Commons, unless I am mistaken, Ministers found it impossible to get beyond that part of it which related to University alterations. As soon as it went on to legislate for the Colleges, the opposition was too strong for them, and the whole subject was postponed by Parliament, and made over for the consideration of a small Commission, with so many checks and limitations upon its proceedings, that there is reason for fearing that, whatever comes of them, the University will not be less enslaved by the Collegiate interest than it is at present.*

Since this was written, there have been far larger changes in the polity and system of this University.

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CHAPTER XX.

UNIVERSITIES AND

SEMINARIES:

L'ECOLE DES HAUTES ETUDES.

O two institutions are more distinct from each other

in character, than Universities and Seminaries: and their very difference might seem a pledge that they would not come into collision with each other. Seminaries are for the education of the clergy; Universities for the education of laymen. They are for separate purposes, and they act in separate spheres; yet, such is human infirmity, perhaps they ever will be rivals in their actual working. So at least it has been in time past. Universities grew out of the Episcopal Schools; and then, as time went on, they returned evil for good, and gradually broke the strength, and drained away the life of the institution which had given them birth; an institution too, which was of far more importance to the Church than themselves. Universities are ornaments indeed and bulwarks to Religion; but Seminaries are essential to its purity and efficiency. It is plain then, if the action and interests of the two institutions have conflicted, which side the Church would take in the quarrel. She would side for the injured party, against the aggressor; for the party more important to her, against the party less so. Universities then for a long season have been sustaining the punishment of past ambition; and it seems hardly right to close this survey of them without saying a few words about them under this aspect.

As Seminaries are so necessary to the Church, they are one of her earliest appointments. Scarcely had the New Dispensation opened, when, following the example of the Schools of the Temple and of the Prophets under the Old, St. John is recorded, over and above the public assemblies of the faithful, to have had about him a number of students whom he familiarly instructed; and, as time went, and power was given to the Church, this School for ecclesiastical learning was placed under the roof of the Bishop. In Rome especially, where we look for the pattern to which other churches are to be conformed, the clergy, not of the city only, but of the provinces, were brought under the immediate eye of the Pope. The Lateran Church, his first Cathedral, had a Seminary attached to it, which remained there till the pontificate of Leo the Tenth, when it was transferred into the heart of the city. The students entered within its walls from the earliest childhood; but they were not raised from minor orders till the age of twenty, nor did they reach the priesthood till after the trial of many years. Strict as a monastic noviciate, it nevertheless included polite literature in its course; and a library was attached to it for the use of the seminarists. was educated about the year 310, St. Eusebius, afterwards in Arian times the celebrated Bishop of Vercellæ ; and in the dark age which followed, it was the home from childhood of some of the greatest Popes, St. Gregory the Second, St. Paul the First, St. Leo the Third, St. Paschal, and St. Nicholas the First. This venerable Seminary, called anciently the School of the Pontifical Palace, has never failed. Even when the barbarians were wasting the face of Italy, and destroying its accumulations of literature, the great Council of Rome, under Pope Agatho, as I mentioned above, could testify, not

Here

indeed to the theological science of the school in that miserable age, but to its faithful preservation of the unbroken teaching of revealed truth and of the traditions of the Fathers. In the thirteenth century, we find it in a flourishing condition, and St. Thomas and Albertus Magnus lecturing in its halls.

Such a prerogative of perpetuity was not enjoyed elsewhere. Europe lay submerged under the waters of a deluge; and, when they receded, schools had to be refounded as well as churches. One of the principal results of Charlemagne's visit to Rome, was the reform or revival of education, both secular and ecclesiastical; and on his return to the north he addressed his wellknown letter on the subject to the chapters and monastic bodies through his Empire. Henceforth the Pope made Seminaries obligatory in every Diocese: as to the laity, they attended the public Schools spoken of in a former Chapter.

Seminaries then were long in possession before Universities were imagined; and Universities rose out of them. And, when Universities were established, in order to preserve the equilibrium between clerical and lay education, it was decreed, by the authority of the Canons, that secular learning should be studied in the Seminaries, and that each Cathedral should maintain masters for its teaching. It was foreseen that, unless this was done, Universities would supply a higher and a wider education than the Episcopal Schools; and that the clergy would either become inferior to the monks and the laity, or would be drawn within the precincts and influence of Universities.

The latter of these inconveniences actually took place. The lectures in the Universities, after all, were necessarily superior to those which a Seminary could furnish. Ac

cordingly, Colleges for ecclesiastical students were founded in their neighbourhood, and the Cathedral Schools fell in reputation, and were gradually deserted. The youths, who would have found their natural home there, sometimes entered the Colleges aforesaid, sometimes attended the schools of the Regulars, sometimes lived in lodgings as other students. It is sufficient to refer to the Lives of the Medieval Saints for instances of ordination taking place from or at the Universities without Seminary training; take, for example, St. Raymund, St. John of Matha, St. Thomas of Canterbury, St. Edmund, St. John Nepomucene, St. Caietan, St. Carlo, St. Ignatius and his companions, or St. Francis of Sales,-men, who lived in very various ages and countries, and some of whom had to repel the shameless assaults, to which their defenceless condition, in the midst of great cities, exposed them. And thus it was, that by the date of the Council of Trent, Seminaries had all but ceased to exist; and the candidates for the Priesthood, who had any learning and any religious training, either gained it for themselves, as they could, amid the mixed concourse of a University, or as members of Colleges, which had themselves suffered materially in their discipline from University contact.

There would be danger to their faith and religious temper, as well as to their morals. In Universities, subjects of every sort were disputed publicly; and boys, who ought to have been schooled at a Seminary in distrust of the intellect and modesty of speculation, were suffered to imbibe a critical, carping, curious spirit, most unbecoming in an ecclesiastic, on the interpretation of difficulties of Scripture, or on the deepest questions of theology. And the state of things became still more grave, when Protestantism arose, and its adherents