[28] Dowdall Register.
[29] Cardinal Bellarmine warns his readers that our author is caute legendus in the 4th cap. of the 10th, and the 4th cap. of the 11th books. The Cardinal does not approve of his doctrine, de potestate presbyterorum, nor of his teaching on the mendicant state.
MR. BUTT AND NATIONAL EDUCATION.[30]
No Irish Catholic can examine the system of National Education without being filled with alarm for the safety of our faith in Ireland.
The tendency of the national system is to give a full control over the education of the rising generations in Ireland to the English Government, thus affording them an opportunity of undermining true faith, and of effecting by favours, promises, gifts, and influence, what they sought in vain to obtain by penal laws, by confiscation of property, and by fire and sword. The system also tends to weaken pastoral authority, to deprive the successors of the apostles, who were sent by Christ to teach all nations, of their lawful influence, and to separate priest and people. Such consequences necessarily follow from the operation of model and training schools, and from the vast powers given in all educational matters to a body of commissioners appointed by the government, and dependent on it—commissioners, many of whom are openly hostile to the religion of the people of Ireland, whilst others have given proof that they are either unable or unwilling to defend it or support its rights and interests. But even if the commissioners were most anxious to do justice to Catholics, the nature of the system which they have bound themselves to carry out would frustrate their good intentions. The mixed system proposes to collect into the same school teachers and pupils of every religious denomination, Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Jews, and to do nothing and to teach nothing in the school, and to publish nothing in the schoolbooks, offensive to any of them. Hence all prayers, the catechism, all teaching of the special doctrines and practices of the Catholic Church, must be banished from the school during the hours of teaching, and the books placed in the hands of children which are calculated to exercise great influence on their after life, must be compiled in a style of indifference to every religion. Indeed we could not expect to find anything good or religious in books composed by a Protestant archbishop of rationalistic and latitudinarian views, who does not appear to have believed in the Trinity or the Divinity of Christ, who raised himself to the episcopal dignity by publishing the Errors of Romanism, and who terminated his career by admitting that his object in compiling some of the books introduced into the national schools was to dissipate the darkness in which the Irish people are sitting, or, in other words, to spread among them his own dangerous principles, and to undermine their faith.
Whilst the national system is beset by so many dangers, we cannot but be anxious that its character and tendencies should be accurately examined, and the objections to which it is liable fairly stated to the public. We are now happy to be able to say that all this has been done by a Protestant barrister, Mr. Isaac Butt, late M.P. for Youghal. This learned and eloquent gentleman has just published a treatise entitled The Liberty of Teaching Vindicated, in which he gives the history of the system of National Education, and discusses its merit. The writer appears to have studied the subject with the greatest care, and to have made himself acquainted with all its bearings. His treatise is written with great clearness and moderation; his views upon education are liberal and accurate; and his arguments against allowing the education of Ireland to pass into the hands of a hostile government, are most powerful and unanswerable. Mr. Butt has rendered us an immense service by publishing so valuable a treatise. We recommend all our friends to provide themselves with it, and to peruse it most carefully.
We shall now give some few extracts from it to show the spirit in which it is written. The treatise is dedicated to Mr. Gladstone, and in the dedication Mr. Butt calls on that great statesman to apply to Ireland the principles of justice and liberality, which he had so often advocated in the case of other nations, principles unhappily ignored in the management of Irish affairs by those who have the reins of power in their hands.
"Most of our departments are managed as if the chief art of Irish government consisted in a dexterous thwarting, or, at least, ignoring of all local and national wishes, as they are represented by the class with whom the department has to deal. In no country in the world, not even in the Austrian provinces of Venetia, are national feeling and sentiment so completely excluded from any control over the management of national affairs"—(p. viii.)
Applying what he had stated to the question of national education, he adds:—