he Non-conformist conscience. The attempt to force
undenominationalism on the country has been an expensive failure.
Recognising this, the denominational--nay, more, the Jesuit--University
College has in a niggardly fashion and by a back door been subsidised by
the State. The demand is for no more than a university which shall be
Catholic in the sense that it shall be national, and this in a
preponderatingly Catholic country implies Catholicism. The Irish
Catholic bishops in 1897 declared they are prepared to accept a
university without tests in which the majority of the governing body
are laymen, with a provision that no State funds should be employed for
the promotion of religious education. It is idle, in view of this, to
protest that the demand is urged only on behalf of rampant clericalism,
and that the only form of university which Catholics will accept is of
such a kind as would serve to strengthen the hand of the priests, whose
sole aim in this demand is to secure that increase of power. The shifts
of intolerance are many, but I cannot believe that it will long continue
to masquerade in this manner as the statesmanlike buffer between a
priest-ridden country and an aggressive clergy. Granting, for the sake
of argument, that this was the case, one would have thought that a
well-educated laity was better able than one without education to
withstand the encroaches of clericalism. We do not ask for a
denominational college, but remember that the only colleges, Keble and
Selwyn, founded in Oxford and Cambridge in the last eighty years are
purely denominational. In the last forty years six new universities have
been founded in England, and the number of university students has risen
from 2,300 to 13,000. In Ireland, on the other hand, for three-fourths
of the population knowledge must still remain a fountain sealed; it is
as though one were applying literally to that country the text--"He that
increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow."

In connection with what one may call the Bryce scheme it may be well to
point out that as long ago as 1871 the hierarchy proposed a solution on
the same lines. In a Pastoral letter of that year, after insisting on
the principle of equality, the following passage occurred--"All this
can, we believe, be attained by modifying the constitution of the
University of Dublin, so as to admit the establishment of a second
College within it, in every respect equal to Trinity College, and
conducted o