

APOLOGY FOR THE BELFAST ADDRESS. 213 



deal on the score of fair play, where so much has been 

 unfair, thinks that the Irish Cardinal, Archbishops, and 

 Bishops, in a recent manifesto, adroitly employed a 

 weapon which I, at an unlucky moment, placed in their 

 hands. The antecedents of their action cause me to 

 regard it in a different light; and a brief reference to 

 these antecedents will, I think, illuminate not only 

 their proceedings regarding Belfast, but other doings 

 which have been recently noised abroad. 



Before me lies a document bearing the date of 

 November 1873, which, after appearing for a moment, 

 unaccountably vanished from public view. It is a 

 Memorial addressed, by Seventy of the Students and 

 Ex-students of the Catholic University in Ireland, to the 

 Episcopal Board of the University ; and it constitutes 

 the plainest and bravest remonstrance ever addressed by 

 Irish laymen to their spiritual pastors and masters. It 

 expresses the profoundest dissatisfaction with the curri- 

 culum marked out for the students of the University ; 

 setting forth the extraordinary fact that the lecture-list 

 for the faculty of Science, published a month before 

 they wrote, did not contain the name of a single Pro- 

 fessor of the Physical or Natural Sciences. 



The memorialists forcibly deprecate this, and dwell 

 upon the necessity of education in science : ' The distin- 

 guishing mark of this age is its ardour for science. The 

 natural sciences have, within the last fifty years, be- 

 come the chiefest study in the world ; they are in our 

 time pursued with an activity unparalleled in the his- 

 tory of mankind. Scarce a year now passes without 

 some discovery being made in these sciences which, as 

 with the touch of the magician's wand, shivers to atoms 

 theories formerly deemed unassailable. It is through 

 the physical and natural sciences that the fiercest as- 

 saults are now made on our religion. No more deadly 



