ceive it is as little
disrespectful to Lord Bacon to prefer the Classics in this point of view
to the sciences which have grown out of his philosophy as it would be
disrespectful to St. Thomas in the middle ages to have hindered the study
of the Summa from doing prejudice to the Faculty of Arts. Accordingly, I
anticipate that, as in the middle ages both the teaching and the
government of the University remained in the Faculty of Arts, in spite of
the genius which created or illustrated Theology and Law, so now too,
whatever be the splendour of the modern philosophy, the marvellousness of
its disclosures, the utility of its acquisitions, and the talent of its
masters, still it will not avail in the event, to detrude classical
literature and the studies connected with it from the place which they
have held in all ages in education.

Such, then, is the course of reflection obviously suggested by the act in
which we have been lately engaged, and which we are now celebrating. In
the nineteenth century, in a country which looks out upon a new world, and
anticipates a coming age, we have been engaged in opening the Schools
dedicated to the studies of polite literature and liberal science, or what
are called the Arts, as a first step towards the establishment on Catholic
ground of a Catholic University. And while we thus recur to Greece and
Athens with pleasure and affection, and recognize in that famous land the
source and the school of intellectual culture, it would be strange indeed
if we forgot to look further south also, and there to bow before a more
glorious luminary, and a more sacred oracle of truth, and the source of
another sort of knowledge, high and supernatural, which is seated in
Palestine. Jerusalem is the fountain-head of religious knowledge, as
Athens is of secular. In the ancient world we see two centres of
illumination, acting independently of each other, each with its own
movement, and at first apparently without any promise of convergence.
Greek civilization spreads over the East, conquering in the conquests of
Alexander, and, when carried captive into the West, subdues the conquerors
who brought it thither. Religion, on the other hand, is driven from its
own aboriginal home to the North and West by reason of the sins of the
people who were in charge of it, in a long course of judgments and plagues
and persecutions. Each by itself pursues its career and fulfils its
mission; neither of them recognizes, nor i