_Higher Education--Duty of the Hour for Western Catholics._
"When a reflective man of middle life walks along the embowered paths of Oxford and Cambridge or through their quadrangles whose walls have echoed to the footsteps of so many brainy men of England, he realizes what these institutions have been and still are to Great Britain and the Empire." From the lecture halls of these seats of learning have gone, generation after generation, the men who framed and directed the course of studies of other universities, the legislators and statesmen that have shaped the destinies of the British Empire. "There is not a feature or a point in the national character which has made England great among the nations of the world, that is not strongly developed and plainly traceable in our universities. For eight hundred or a thousand years they have been intimately associated with everything that has concerned the highest interest of the country." (W. E. Gladstone.) This example of the power of Oxford and Cambridge is so typical that one immediately grasps its meaning and appreciates its full value. On that immense background of the Empire they stand out indeed in bold relief as the embodiment of higher education, as the great portals that open on the highway of true leadership. Is not the affiliation, that subtle intellectual bond which units our universities of Canada to those two great seats of learning, a permanent and living proof of this fact?
A university is the vital centre of a nation's life. Around it, by a gradual process of elimination and a natural force of gravitation, centre the master minds; from it, as from a fountain-head, flow with true leadership in every branch of human society, progress, wealth and prosperity. On the force of this _centripetal_ and _centrifugal_ movement of a university depends its value in the community. "The increase in number and efficiency of universities," said Bishop Spalding, "is the healthy proof of the vitality and energy of a nation."
In the educational system of a country the university stands out as the apex, the culminating and crowning point of its intellectual life. For, as the college course develops the studious and acquisitive powers of the mind, the university course has in view its creative and formative powers. "Glorious to most are the days of life in a great school," says Morley, "but it is at college that aspiring talents enter into their own inheritance." "It is the function of education in the highest sense, to teach man that there are latent in him possibilities beyond what he has dreamed of, and to develop in him capacities of which without contact with the highest learning, he had never become aware." (Haldane.) We may well call the university "the brains of a nation." It equips the student with standards and tests of objective truth. . . . It makes him dig down to the bed-rock on which truth in its various manifestations rests. . . . Universities are indeed the nurseries of the higher life, the living sources from which knowledge and culture flow in abundant streams. They do the thinking for the teeming masses who have neither the leisure nor the opportunity to think for themselves and who live on that mental atmosphere we call "public opinion." From the heights of our universities, ideas and principles gradually filter down into the lower strata of the nation. The novel, the Sunday supplement, the stage, the cinema screen--these post-graduate courses of the working man--are popularizing to-day the theories and ideals that were yesterday honoured in our secular institutions of higher education. It may take time, perhaps centuries, for this process of intellectual filtration; but ideas, like the stream, are bound to follow the incline of the water-shed.