INAUGURAL ADDRESS. DELIVERED AT THE ACADEMIA OF THE CATHOLIC RELIGION, WHEN I received the invitation of the Bishop of Salford to deliver the inaugural address at the opening of this Academia I had a special motive which made me very gladly accept it. About eleven years ago, it fell to my lot, by command of my Bishop, the late Cardinal, during his last illness, to take a foremost part in founding the Academia of the Catholic religion in London. The Cardinal himself was unable to undertake the work, and he deputed me to fulfil it. According to the best of my power I executed the task. The Cardinal published at the time an invitation to those who would become members of the Academia, from which I will read a few words. Next to the exercise of its purest spiritual office, the Church has in all ages bestowed its special care on the cultivation of the intellect and the advancement of science, making the Word of God the interpretation of His works, and His works the illustration of His Word, and the science of God the centre and light of the manifold and various orders of human knowledge. For this cause the Church of God has always given special encouragement to the studies which demonstrate the connection between science and revealed religion, thereby applying the truths and laws of the intellectual and natural world to the confirmation of the faith." Cardinal Wiseman then went on to say, that at the beginning of the present century, when the sceptical and infidel literature of Germany and France penetrated throughout Europe, there was formed an Academia in Rome for the purpose of cultivating this special aspect of science; and he next affirmed that the circumstances of our day seemed to demand in England an institution of the same kind; that the intellectual condition of England at that moment was such as to alarm the least anxious as to the divergence of sacred and secular science, and the unnatural position in which they seemed to stand; and that rationalistic tendencies of thought in an advanced form had explicitly shown themselves in the most educated centres of England.' Such was the purpose with which the Academia was founded. in the diocese of Westminster. It has endured for eleven years, I am happy to say, without flagging. Its sessions have been maintained, papers have been. read which have been printed and published in three volumes, of which two lie here before me. Of their quality you must judge for yourselves. I can say that the benefit of the Academia has been very great. It has, first of all, attracted and bound together a number of Catholics of all ages; men who desire to cultivate Preface to vol. i. Essays on Religion and Literature (Longmans, 1865). science and literature in relation to faith. It has enabled them to correspond, and to co-operate together, and to form what I may call a Catholic opinion outside of faith. I have observed a very perceptible growth of a solid Catholic opinion resulting, in my belief, in no small degree from the action of the Academia. These, I believe, are the motives which have made you desire to transplant, as it were, the Academia to Manchester. 1. The late Cardinal, in the instructive passage from which I have already quoted, spoke pointedly of the visible tendency which exists in England to separate off science and to oppose it to faith. The other day there fell into my hands an example of this, tendency. I do not refer to it in any spirit hostile to the writer. I am under no temptation to do so, for I know him personally, and can bear testimony to his highly amiable and excellent private character. He is a man endowed with a singular facility and beauty of imagination, a strange subtilty of thought, a poetic power which seems to tinge and to pervade even his science; and when he gambols in the world of light, which is his own, and floats in the azure amidst the beauties and the glories of the empyrean, no one is more ready than I am to admire and acknowledge. the singular gifts of which he is possessed. But when a spirit so ethereal clothes itself in the buff jerkin of Cromwell's Ironsides, or in the mailed coat of a Lutheran trooper, it seems to me somewhat incongruous, and I trust I may be pardoned by my friend if I regard his masquerade with some little kindly amusement. Well, the other day a letter under the VOL. II. U |