From this time onwards Trinity College, accessible to Presbyterians some years before, received Catholics honourably within its precincts. A few distinguished Catholic Irishmen have obtained the excellent education it has always afforded; and these have been treated with scrupulous fairness; no attempt at proselytising has ever been made or thought of. Their numbers, however, have never been large; and they were necessarily placed in an inferior position, for they could not become professors, fellows, or scholars; the college remained an institution essentially Protestant, even anti-Catholic, in much of its teaching, for example, in the predilection it long showed for Locke. The college continued to thrive and to make progress; the reproach cast on it that she was the 'silent sister,' was rather due to the want of publishing enterprise in the Irish capital, than to any deficiency in literary power; at all events, it has long ago been removed; Trinity College has stood for a century in the foremost rank of places of learning famed for scientific eminence. In 1843-44 an attempt was made to introduce Catholics on the foundation, as scholars; but this was prohibited by the statutes; some 'non-foundation' scholarships were then endowed; and Catholics were enabled to compete for them. This was the position of the college, when, in 1844-45, after the agitation for Repeal had shown how disaffected Catholic Ireland still was, Peel turned his mind to Irish remedial measures, and among these to a reform of high education in Ireland. His policy was to maintain the Union intact, and all the institutions closely connected with it, but to create institutions, so to speak, alongside of these, to which Irish Presbyterians, and Catholics especially, might freely resort, in complete equality with all Irishmen; he therefore left Trinity College exactly as it was, but resolved to establish and endow places of learning, which he hoped would be popular supplements to it, and would give a University training to students who, as affairs stood, were not on the same level as the favoured Protestants in it. He founded the Queen's Colleges of Belfast, of Cork, and of Galway; these were supplied with an ample staff of professors, endowed, and given the means to bestow many prizes; and they were affiliated to the Queen's University, empowered to confer degrees. The principle on which these institutions were formed was, following the so-called liberalism of the time, almost exactly the same as that on which the Irish National Schools had been based. Secular education in them was to be united, religious education was to be kept apart; their students were to learn the things that belonged to this world together; but as to what belonged to another world, this teaching was to be provided by their pastors outside their colleges, and they were not to have it in common. The colleges, and the University, therefore, were essentially seats of non-religious knowledge;