APOLOGY FOR THE BELFAST ADDRESS. 21 1 



Catholic hierarchy of Ireland; a body usually too wise 

 to confer notoriety upon an adversary by imprudently 

 denouncing him. The ' Times,' to which I owe a great 

 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 consti- 

 tutes the plainest and bravest remonstrance ever ad- 

 dressed by Irish laymen to their spiritual pastors and 

 masters. It expresses the profoundest dissatisfaction 

 with the curriculum 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 Professor 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 chief est 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 



