yed a weapon which I, at an unlucky moment, placed in
their hands. The antecedents of their action cause me to regard it in
a different light; and a brief reference to these antecedents will, I
think, illuminate not only their proceedings regarding Belfast, but
other doings which have been recently noised abroad.

Before me lies a document bearing the date of November 1873, which,
after appearing for a moment, unaccountably vanished from public view.
It is a Memorial addressed, by Seventy of the Students and Ex-students
of the Catholic University in Ireland, to the Episcopal Board of the
University; and it constitutes the plainest and bravest remonstrance
ever addressed by Irish laymen to their spiritual pastors and masters.
It expresses the profoundest dissatisfaction with the curriculum
marked out for the students of the University; setting forth the
extraordinary fact that the lecture-list for the faculty of Science,
published a month before they wrote, did not contain the name of a
single Professor of the Physical or Natural Sciences.

The memorialists forcibly deprecate this, and dwell upon the necessity
of education in science: 'The distinguishing mark of this age is its
ardour for science. The natural sciences have, within the last fifty
years, become the chiefest study in the world; they are in our time
pursued with an activity unparalleled in the history of mankind.
Scarce a year now passes without some discovery being made in these
sciences which, as with the touch of the magician's wand, shivers to
atoms theories formerly deemed unassailable. It is through the
physical and natural sciences that the fiercest assaults are now made
on our religion. No more deadly weapon is used against our faith than
the facts incontestably proved by modern researches in science.'

Such statements must be the reverse of comfortable to a number of
gentlemen who, trained in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, have been
accustomed to the unquestioning submission of all other sciences to
their divine science of Theology. But this is not all:

One thing seems certain,' say the memorialists, viz, that if chairs
for the physical and natural sciences be not soon founded in the
Catholic University, very many young men will have their faith exposed
to dangers which the creation of a school of science in the University
would defend them from. For our generation of Irish Catholics are
writhing under the sense of their inferiority in