lution is "the quieting of the conscience," not simply the restoration to open communion; nor can any proof be found that "absolvo te," "I absolve thee," was a form which was limited to the removal of external censures. Indeed, most Churches have a special formulary for the re-admission of penitents to communion. Upon the whole we should advise Mr. Reichel to confine himself to classical literature, of which he is a Professor, and not write again on theology, with which he is most imperfectly acquainted.

NEWMAN ON UNIVERSITIES.

The Office and Work of Universities. By JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, D.D., of the Oratory. Longmans.

THE Foundation of a University, complete in all its Faculties, is so grand and engaging an idea, that it cannot fail to arrest and hold the sympathies of every lover of sound learning. The struggle that we are ourselves maintaining against the encroachments of State Educationists naturally predisposes us to look favourably on any similar effort proceeding from any other religious body. And when to this we add the great and signal failings of national character exhibited by the Irish, and loudly calling for the refining influence of a higher education than what they now possess, together with the lofty antecedents of Dr. Newman, we have certainly said enough to account for the highly-wrought feelings of expectation with which we approached the present volume, which was to set before us the views and hopes with which such an undertaking had been inaugurated upon the banks of the Liffey.

We could not be blind indeed to the difficulties attending such a gigantic enterprise; and therefore we were not surprised to learn that the first scanty band of students whom they were able to collect were almost exclusively sons of some of Dr. Newman's early English friends, rather than natives of the Irish soil. Nor did it escape us that the Church of Rome had an indirect, but by no means unimportant, object in view in commencing this great undertaking,-viz., to find employment for several of Dr. Newman's personal friends, whom he carried with him, and for whom it was by no means easy to provide work adequate to their pretensions and capacities.

We had taken some pains in short to inform ourselves what we ought to expect, and what should be the limits of our expectations, in taking up the present volume. But after all, we have been most sadly disappointed. To say that the letters (for such origi

nally they were) are very far inferior to Dr. Newman's former lectures delivered in England, and that as regards historical research they are not to be compared with Huber's volumes, of which a translation was published some years since by Mr. Heywood,—all this falls infinitely short of the depreciatory judgment that we are compelled to pass upon them. It is true that some allowance might be made on the score of their having been originally published anonymously, and addressed to Irishmen. But the writer rejects any such plea as this, assuring us, in his preface, that "no thought or pains has been spared in the collection of matter, or in their composition."

There are not wanting certainly a few beautiful passages in the Lectures, as we shall presently show, but there is a tone of flattery and banter running throughout, and jarring strangely with the loftiness of aim professed at the beginning, which makes it difficult to believe in the sincerity of the writer. Sometimes the voice of homage seems so ready to crack into shrill irony that one is doubtful whether the speaker believes the words of his own utterance. The whole book is furnished out with theories to suit every point, obtained from the wardrobe of the past, until one feels this very richness to be an evidence that the germinant unconscious life which ought to invigorate the budding promise of the present is wanting. The originator of a great design knows not how he is resuscitating in his own work the family likeness of his ancestors. He acts with freedom, because he thinks not of the vastness of a work aptly proportioned to his own ability. But self-possession along with so much self-consciousness as these chapters indicate, is rather the finished acquirement of the stage, startling yet unreal. To play at history in the foundation of a university is indeed to seek out a vast toy for a man in later life, but the vastness of the idea and purpose will not satisfy the mind if there be even a suspicion that the thing is nothing more than a toy. We for our part are scarcely prepared to go along with the writer, who, after describing a university as a place of universal concourse, the emporium of every excellence, the standard of things rare and precious, sums up this vision of the past with a question, youthful in its hopefulness, if not childlike in its humility.

"Such is it in its idea and in its purpose: such, in good measure, has it before now been in fact. Shall it ever be again? We are going forward in the strength of the Cross, under the patronage of Mary, in the name of Patrick, to attempt it."-P. 25.

"The University of Ireland is proving its possibility, by entering on its work, and presaging its future prosperity by its triumph over the difficulties of its commencement."-P. 379.

The great warrant of the University of Ireland is, indeed, that it is the creation of a pope. This gives it an indomitable impulse,

whilst the emigrative tendencies of the Irish population supply a commensurate extensibility of influence. Dr. Newman regards it as a hopeful sign, that times are changed since efforts were made to found a University in Ireland in the fourteenth century. One cannot but admire the delicacy with which the failure of the historic University, although that had been before only suggested amidst specifications of its excellencies, is interwoven with other sentiments so as to catch the national pride of religion and of race.

"Times are changed since these attempts were made, and while the causes no longer exist which operated in their failure, the object towards which they were directed has attained a moment, both in itself and its various bearings, which could never have been predicted in the 14th or 16th century. Ireland is no longer the possession of a foreign king. It is, as in primitive times, the centre of a great Catholic movement, and of a world-wide missionary enterprise. Nor does the Holy See simply lend an ear to the project of others: it originates the undertaking."-P. 320.

In surveying the history of the popes with a view to convince himself of the soundness of his foundations, Dr. Newman finds two political characteristics of the successors of S. Peter. These are spiritual detachment from the world both in the personal details of life, and in the formation of an external policy, and secondly, a power of political foresight which has never been at fault. According to Dr. Newman, indeed, the lives of the popes would seem to be a record sufficient to convince an infidel, as well by the tokens of intrinsic holiness as by their outward marvel.

"A very pagan (he says) ought to be able to prophesy that our University is destined to great things. I look at the early combats of Popes Victor and Stephen; I go on to Julius and Celestine, Leo and Gregory, Boniface and Nicholas. I pass along the middle ages, down to Paul III. and Pius V., and thence to the two Popes of the same name who occupy the most eventful 50 years since Christianity was; and I cannot shut my eyes to the fact, that the sovereign Pontiffs have a gift proper to themselves, of understanding what is good for the Church, and what Catholic interests require. And in the next place, I find that this gift exercises itself in an absolute independence of secular politics, and a detachment from any earthly and temporal advantage, and pursues its end by uncommon courses, and by unlikely instruments, and by methods of its own. I see that it shines the brightest, and is the most surprising in its results, when its professors are the weakest in this world, and the most despised; that in them are most vividly exemplified the Apostle's words, in the most beautiful and most touching of his Epistles, 'We have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency may be of the power of GOD, and not of us; as needy, and yet enriching many as having nothing, and possessing all things.'

"I get these two points of history well into my mind, and then I shut my book and look at the world before my eyes. I see an age of tran

sition, the breaking up of the old, and the coming in of the new an old system shattered some sixty years ago, and a new state of things, scarcely in its rudiments as yet, to be settled, perhaps, some centuries after our time. And it is a special circumstance in these changes, that they extend beyond the historical platform of human affairs. Not only is Europe broken up, but other continents are thrown open, and the new organisation of society aims at embracing the world. It is a day of colonists and emigrants; and what is another most pertinent consideration, the language they carry with them is English, which, consequently, as time goes on, is certain, humanly speaking, to extend itself into every part of the world. It is already occupying the whole of North America, whence it threatens to descend upon South; already is it the language of Australia, a country large enough, in the course of centuries, to rival Europe in population; already it has become the speech of a hundred marts of commerce scattered over the East; and even where not the mother-tongue, it is at least the medium of intercourse between nations. And lastly, though the people who own that language is Protestant, a race pre-eminently Catholic has adopted it, and has a share in its literature; and this Catholic race is at this very time, of all tribes of the earth, the most fertile in emigrants, both to the West and South. These are the facts of the day, which we should see before our eyes, whether the Pope had anything to say to them or no. The English language and the Irish race are overrunning the world.

When, then, I consider what an eye the Sovereign Pontiffs have for the future, and what an independence in policy and vigour in action have been the characteristics of their present representative; and what a flood of success, mounting higher and higher, has lifted up the Ark of GOD from the beginning of this century; and then that the Holy Father has definitively put his finger upon Ireland, and selected her soil as the seat of the great Catholic University to spread religion, science, and learning wherever the English language is spoken: when I take all these things together-I care not what others think, I care not what others do, God has no need of men,-oppose who will, think who will, I know and cannot doubt that a great work is begun. It is no great imprudence to commit oneself to a guidance which never yet has failed.” --P. 222–225.

Such, then, is Dr. Newman's confidence, and its historical foundation.

In considering what should be the site of a university, he takes Athens as his model. The whole portion of the book relating to Athens is singularly beautiful in its diction. He seems to be quite enamoured of his subject. Athens to him represents in the ancient world the same element which is supplied in the Roman Communion by the oratory of S. Philip, the element of persuasive influence as contrasted with discipline and system. It would be difficult to find many pages of English literature more eloquent than some of those which are here devoted to the consideration of

Athens and Attica, as the centre of intellectual beauty, and at the same time the wild home of many of nature's fairest graces.

"The political power of Athens waned and disappeared: kingdoms rose and fell; centuries rolled away: they did but bring fresh triumphs to the city of the poet and the sage. There at length the swarthy Moor and Spaniard were seen to meet the blue-eyed Gaul; and the Cappadocian, late subject of Mithridates, gazed without alarm at the haughty, conquering Roman. Revolution after revolution passed over the face of Europe, as well as of Greece, but still she was there,-Athens, the city of the mind-as radiant, as splendid, as delicate, as young as ever she had been.

"Many a more fruitful coast or isle is washed by the Ægean; many is the spot more beautiful and sublime to see; many the territory more ample but there was one charm in Attica which in the same perfection was nowhere else. The deep pastures of Arcadia, the plain of Argos, the Thessalian vale-these had not the gift. Boeotia, which lay to its immediate north, was notorious for its very want of it. The heavy atmosphere of that Boeotia might be good for vegetation, but it was associated in popular belief with the dulness of the Boeotian intellect: on the contrary, the special purity, elasticity, clearness, and salubrity of the air of Attica-fit concomitant and emblem of its genius, did that for it which earth did not-it brought out every bright hue and tender shade of the landscape on which it was spread, and would have illuminated the face even of a more bare and rugged country. We must turn for the sympathy we seek to yon pilgrim student, come from a semibarbarous land to that small corner of the earth as to a shrine where he might take his fill of gazing on those emblems and coruscations of invisible unoriginate Perfection. It was the stranger from a remote province, from Britain or from Mauritania-to whom a scene so different from that of his chilly, woody swamps-of his fiery choking sandswould have shown him in a measure what a real University must be, by holding out to him the sort of country which was its suitable home." P. 29-33.

What, then, is now its suitable home? Many would, doubtless, point to Oxford, as cradled amid traditional associations, where the voice of sanctified intellect, swelling forth from the blissful repose of bygone ages, "sinks on the soul," with a rapture more "beautiful and soft" than the sweetest tone of the Angelus from the bell tower in the fairest evening of southern skies. Not so, however, Dr. Newman. He would fear to entangle himself thus in the meshes of memory. The present age is the age of emigration; and he who would rule the intellect of the future must march out from the haunts of his ancestors to new scenes of interest, where beauty and business go hand in hand, and throngs of men from east and west meet once more as they did at Athens, in a clime graced by nature's lavish bounty, and sanctified if not by the consecutive traditions of mediaeval intellect, yet by the giant names of earlier heroes, who prepared the way for letters and piety