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
unseemly legends of a popular mythology He casts His shadow, and is dimly
discerned in the ode or the epic, as in troubled water or in fantastic
dreams. All that is good, all that is true, all that is beautiful, all
that is beneficent, be it great or small, be it perfect or fragmentary,
natural as well as supernatural, moral as well as material, comes from
Him.
8.
If this be a sketch, accurate in substance and as far as it goes, of the
doctrines proper to Theology, and especially of the doctrine of a
particular Providence, which is the portion of it most on a level with
human sciences, I cannot understand at all how, supposing it to be true,
it can fail, considered as knowledge, to exert a powerful influence on
philosophy, literature, and every intellectual creation or discovery
whatever. I cannot understand how it is possible, as the phrase goes, to
blink the question of its truth or falsehood. It meets us with a
profession and a proffer of the highest truths of which the human mind is
capable; it embraces a range of subjects the most diversified and distant
from each other. What science will not find one part or other of its
province traversed by its path? What results of philosophic speculation
are unquestionable, if they have been gained without inquiry as to what
Theology had to say to them? Does it cast no light upon history? has it no
influence upon the principles of ethics? is it without any sort of bearing
on physics, metaphysics, and political science? Can we drop it out of the
circle of knowledge, without allowing, either that that circle is thereby
mutilated, or on the other hand, that Theology is really no science?
And this dilemma is the more inevitable, because Theology is so precise
and consistent in its intellectual structure. When I speak of Theism or
Monotheism, I am not throwing together discordant doctrines; I am not
merging belief, opinion, persuasion, of whatever kind, into a shapeless
aggregate, by the help of ambiguous words, and dignifying this medley by
the name of Theology. I speak of one idea unfolded in its just
proportions, carried out upon an intelligible method, and issuing in
necessary and immutable results; understood indeed at one time and place
better than at another, held here and there with more or less of
inconsistency, but still, after all, in all times and places, where it is
found, the evolution, not of half-a-dozen ideas, but of one.
9.
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