A University Question

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXV, Issue 13, 28 March 1907, Page 9

A University Question

Sweet are the uses of agitation. It can even slay an old and vast monopoly, as patience is said to kill the doughty giant despair. Yet such monopolies die hiaird, amd ' pass out ' with the wifld and furious ' flurry ' of the harpconed whale. After forty years of strenuous pressure and protest, Irish Catholics are, it seems, at last to be placed, in the matter of university education, on somewhat like a fair footing with therr Protestant fellow-countrymen. The intentions 1 oiT the Government were outlined in sufficient detail in our last issue. It took nearly half a century of arguing with stocks and stones to convince statesmen on the other side of the water that the Catholic claims are not (as Lord Dunraven- said) ' the (bugbear they seem "to ill-informed people '. The Irish Catholic Hierarchy formally assented to the following ~ exposition of the case by the same noble Lord :—: — ♦ There is no question of a Catholic University, or of the proscription of any kind of learning, or oi a College exclusively for Roman Catholics, or of a College to every post and emolument of which a Protestant may not aspire '. - And now there looms in sight the end of the long struggle to secure for Irish Catholics a University training apart from the intensely Protestant atmosphere and traditions of Trinity College, Dublin. The moral of

it all" is this : that 'tis dogged that "wins ; and that we must ' learn to labor and to wait '. Time is on, the v side of every good cause that .has a Icing, hard, desert, road to travel to reach its Mount of Vision. Even total failure were better in such a cause than the 1 hopelessness that sits still with folded hands and sewnup lips. But in the dictionary of G-od's good work there -is no such word as ' Failure '. < . ' There lives a Judge To whose all-pondering mind a noble aimFaithfully kept is as a noble deed '. In His pure sight all virtue, and all noble effort, •succeed. The success may come as -to the immediate object of patient sjtrMng. But" is there 'no other measure of success but the conventional one of achievement "along the one chalked line of single effort ? Ask the Saints. And ask the Scientists.