uence in throwing us back on ourselves,
and making us our own centre, and our minds the measure of all things.
This then is the tendency of that Liberal Education, of which a University
is the school, viz., to view Revealed Religion from an aspect of its
own,--to fuse and recast it,--to tune it, as it were, to a different key,
and to reset its harmonies,--to circumscribe it by a circle which
unwarrantably amputates here, and unduly develops there; and all under the
notion, conscious or unconscious, that the human intellect, self-educated
and self-supported, is more true and perfect in its ideas and judgments
than that of Prophets and Apostles, to whom the sights and sounds of
Heaven were immediately conveyed. A sense of propriety, order,
consistency, and completeness gives birth to a rebellious stirring against
miracle and mystery, against the severe and the terrible.

This Intellectualism first and chiefly comes into collision with precept,
then with doctrine, then with the very principle of dogmatism;--a
perception of the Beautiful becomes the substitute for faith. In a country
which does not profess the faith, it at once runs, if allowed, into
scepticism or infidelity; but even within the pale of the Church, and with
the most unqualified profession of her Creed, it acts, if left to itself,
as an element of corruption and debility. Catholicism, as it has come down
to us from the first, seems to be mean and illiberal; it is a mere popular
religion; it is the religion of illiterate ages or servile populations or
barbarian warriors; it must be treated with discrimination and delicacy,
corrected, softened, improved, if it is to satisfy an enlightened
generation. It must be stereotyped as the patron of arts, or the pupil of
speculation, or the protege of science; it must play the literary
academician, or the empirical philanthropist, or the political partisan;
it must keep up with the age; some or other expedient it must devise, in
order to explain away, or to hide, tenets under which the intellect
labours and of which it is ashamed--its doctrine, for instance, of grace,
its mystery of the Godhead, its preaching of the Cross, its devotion to
the Queen of Saints, or its loyalty to the Apostolic See. Let this spirit
be freely evolved out of that philosophical condition of mind, which in
former Discourses I have so highly, so justly extolled, and it is
impossible but, first indifference, then laxity of belief, then even
heresy