The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of DublinNewman, John Henry
Religion
The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin
Newman, John Henry
Education, Higher; Universities and colleges
It is natural to expect this from the very circumstance that the
philosophy of Education is founded on truths in the natural order. Where
the sun shines bright, in the warm climate of the south, the natives of
the place know little of safeguards against cold and wet. They have,
indeed, bleak and piercing blasts; they have chill and pouring rain, but
only now and then, for a day or a week; they bear the inconvenience as
they best may, but they have not made it an art to repel it; it is not
worth their while; the science of calefaction and ventilation is reserved
for the north. It is in this way that Catholics stand relatively to
Protestants in the science of Education; Protestants depending on human
means mainly, are led to make the most of them: their sole resource is to
use what they have; “Knowledge is” their “power” and nothing else; they
are the anxious cultivators of a rugged soil. It is otherwise with us;
“_funes ceciderunt mihi in prœclaris_.” We have a goodly inheritance. This
is apt to cause us (I do not mean to rely too much on prayer, and the
Divine Blessing, for that is impossible; but) we sometimes forget that we
shall please Him best, and get most from Him, when, according to the
Fable, we “put our shoulder to the wheel,” when we use what we have by
nature to the utmost, at the same time that we look out for what is beyond
nature in the confidence of faith and hope. However, we are sometimes
tempted to let things take their course, as if they would in one way or
another turn up right at last for certain; and so we go on, living from
hand to mouth, getting into difficulties and getting out of them,
succeeding certainly on the whole, but with failure in detail which might
be avoided, and with much of imperfection or inferiority in our
appointments and plans, and much disappointment, discouragement, and
collision of opinion in consequence. If this be in any measure the state
of the case, there is certainly so far a reason for availing ourselves of
the investigations and experience of those who are not Catholics, when we
have to address ourselves to the subject of Liberal Education.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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