The Education Question.—The New-Englander, as the organ of the venerable Yale University, has recently contained some admirable articles on the methods of promoting the higher education. It makes war upon bogus universities, colleges, and systems with calm but resolute force. Among the sound and sensible suggestions it makes, these are some of the chief ones: (1) The preparatory schools should be improved by a more thorough and extensive course of study in the classics, and in some of the modern languages. (2) The collegiate course should be correspondingly improved, and modified, by imitating in part the tutor system of the English universities; but, by no means, changed into the loose system of misnamed universities. (3) The university should be gradually formed as a sequence of the improved collegiate system, and should consist of the college proper, together with post-graduate courses of higher studies in all the branches of science. The necessity of religious instruction is unanswerably proved, and the especial fitness of clergymen for the work of education well defended and advocated. The necessity of having every college under the religious care of some one denomination is also satisfactorily shown. We wonder that the remarkably frank and candid writer in The New-Englander does not see, however, that he has proved this necessity as a pis aller, and indirectly furnished a terrible argument against his own sect and all Protestantism. He directly acknowledges that it is necessary to have sectarian teachers; that, nevertheless, sectarianism is too narrow a thing for a liberal university, and that the teachers must suppress their sectarianism and teach in a sort of catholic spirit. This is as clear a proof as we could wish to have that Protestantism is incompetent to the function of a religious teacher, and, therefore, that a perfect university cannot exist except in the Catholic Church. We hope, at all events, that the influence of New Haven will be thrown fully and consistently against godless schools of all sorts, and in favor of the right of parents to have schools where their children can be taught the religion which they themselves profess.
The Christian World on the Rev. H. Seymour.—This organ of the anti-Catholic crusade deserts Mr. Seymour and Mr. Bacon, in their attack on Catholic morality. The November number furnishes us with the following editorial remark, the last clause of which we would especially recommend to the attention of all our opponents, the editors of The Christian World included: "The interest awakened by the present discussion of this subject leads us to print the foregoing. There is much of force in Mr. Seymour's statements and reasonings respecting the matter of homicide, even though a double or treble percentage is allowed for Protestant England. But we are constrained to say, in the interest of fair dealing, that the remaining statistics of Mr. S. respecting illegitimacy seem to us to lack the precision and discrimination essential to a conclusive argument in that direction. Moreover, the force of these statistics is, to say the least, greatly counteracted by the admitted facts respecting fœticide charged against certain Protestant communities. In conducting the issue with Romanism it is wiser to avoid every questionable position."
Dr. Bellows threatening Civil War.—The Liberal Christian is proving itself the most illiberal of all our religious journals of late. It recently violated literary courtesy by charging upon the editor of this magazine a deliberate falsehood, without any other reason than an unauthorized and incorrect conjecture that he was the author of an article published in our columns entitled, "Free Religion." In its issue for November 20th, it publishes a most arrogant and inflammatory article, by Dr. Bellows, on "Romanism and Common Schools," which is quite in the spirit of several other utterances of that gentleman, who appears to have contracted a taste for civil war that was not satiated by our late one. Whoever seeks to disturb the civic peace existing between Catholics and Protestants in this country, to rouse their angry passions, to array them against each other as hostile political factions, is the greatest enemy of his country, and deserves to be classed with the men who endeavored to fire our hotels, and those who stirred up the mobs of Charleston, Philadelphia, and New-York. Happily, Dr. Bellows's fits of ill-humor are so well understood that they make but slight impression on any one.
Caricaturing as a Fine Art.—One of our popular magazines (Harper's) has recently sought to distinguish itself in this line, and has succeeded both in its articles on Catholic questions, and in its burlesque illustrations, in producing something strictly sui generis and far exceeding, in the strict exclusion of every other element except caricature, the feebler efforts of artists less skilled in the work of distortion. We may say without exaggeration that it has attained the ne plus ultra of caricaturing as a fine art.