3dly, If they had been Catholics, in the _fullest_ sense, who founded our Universities, it was not _as_ Catholics that they founded them, but as great families who had accumulated property under our system of laws; and secondly, as natives of the land. They were _able_ to found universities, because they had been protected by English laws; they were _willing_ to found universities, because they were of English birth, and loved their native land. The Countess of Richmond, for instance, or Henry VI., in his great foundations at Eton or Cambridge, or Baliol at Oxford, did not think of Popery under any relation to heresy. They thought of it, so far as _at all_ they thought of it, in its general abstraction of spiritual loveliness; and under that shape it differed not at all from the Protestantism of the English church. The temper in which they acted, is a pledge that they thought of man, and the children of man, not in relation to those points in which they differed, but to those above all in which they agreed. They were compatriots of the islanders--they loved knowledge--and in those characters, not as Papists, they founded colleges. 4thly, Supposing that in the plenary and controversial sense they _had_ been Catholics who founded our great mediaeval institutions; supposing, next, that they had founded them as Catholics, and _because_ they were Catholics; supposing, also, that from them, in that aerial character of "_persons holding a creed_," any rights of inheritance could, by leave of Thomas Aquinas, be imagined metaphysically to descend; lastly, and notwithstanding all this, their establishments had passed into the hands of other trustees by due course of law--that is, by legislation under the countersign of king, lords, and commons; that is, by the same title under which any man whatever, Papist or Protestant, holds any property whatever. Are we obliged to settle an annuity upon A B, because he can trace himself lineally to a man who held our lands under Edward the Confessor? Yet, by the supposition, A B _can_ prove a relation in blood to the ancient owner, though none at all to the lands. But the Catholics can show no relation whatever either to the foundations at Oxford, or to the blood of the founder. Upon this conceit, if a man could trace his blood to an ancient Druid, he would have a _lien_ in law upon all the oak-trees in the island! _Risum teneatis?_