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
These are not the words of rhetoric, Gentlemen, but of history. All who
take part with the Apostle, are on the winning side. He has long since
given warrants for the confidence which he claims. From the first he has
looked through the wide world, of which he has the burden; and, according
to the need of the day, and the inspirations of his Lord, he has set
himself now to one thing, now to another; but to all in season, and to
nothing in vain. He came first upon an age of refinement and luxury like
our own, and, in spite of the persecutor, fertile in the resources of his
cruelty, he soon gathered, out of all classes of society, the slave, the
soldier, the high-born lady, and the sophist, materials enough to form a
people to his Master’s honour. The savage hordes come down in torrents
from the north, and Peter went out to meet them, and by his very eye he
sobered them, and backed them in their full career. They turned aside and
flooded the whole earth, but only to be more surely civilized by him, and
to be made ten times more his children even than the older populations
which they had overwhelmed. Lawless kings arose, sagacious as the Roman,
passionate as the Hun, yet in him they found their match, and were
shattered, and he lived on. The gates of the earth were opened to the east
and west, and men poured out to take possession; but he went with them by
his missionaries, to China, to Mexico, carried along by zeal and charity,
as far as those children of men were led by enterprise, covetousness, or
ambition. Has he failed in his successes up to this hour? Did he, in our
fathers’ day, fail in his struggle with Joseph of Germany and his
confederates, with Napoleon, a greater name, and his dependent kings,
that, though in another kind of fight, he should fail in ours? What grey
hairs are on the head of Judah, whose youth is renewed like the eagle’s,
whose feet are like the feet of harts, and underneath the Everlasting
arms?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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