Great has been the outcry raised against the ’godless colleges, that Sir Robert Peel had the courageous good sense to inflict on Ireland.  Protestant as well as Romanist priests are terribly alarmed lest those colleges should spoil the craft by which they live.  Sagacious enough to perceive that whatever influence they possess must vanish with the ignorance on which it rests, they moved heaven and earth to disgust the Irish people with an educational measure of which religion formed no part.  Their fury, like ‘empty space,’ is boundless.  They cannot endure the thought that our ministers should so far play the game of ‘infidelity’ as to take from them the delightful task of teaching Ireland’s young ideas ‘how to shoot.’  Sir Robert Inglis christened this ‘odious’ measure, a ‘gigantic scheme of godless education,’ and a large majority of Irish Roman Catholic Prelates have solemnly pronounced it ‘dangerous to faith and morals,’ Neither ministerial allurements, nor ministerial threats can subdue the cantankerous spirit of these bigots.  They are all but frantic, and certainly not without reason, for the Irish Colleges Bill is the fine point of that wedge which, driven home, will shiver to pieces their ‘wicked political system.’  Whatever improves Irish intellect will play the mischief with its ‘faith,’ though not at all likely to deteriorate its ‘morals.’  The best guarantee for national morality is to be found in national intelligence; nor need any one feel alarmed at the progress of principles and measures inimical to faith in either Romanism or Protestantism.  Let the people of Ireland be properly employed, as a preliminary to being well educated, and speedily they may deserve to be singled out as ’the most moral people on the face of the earth.’

An educated nation will never tamely submit to be priest-ridden, and well do Ireland’s enslavers know it.  The most stupid of her priests, equally with the shrewdest of her ‘patriots,’ are quite alive to the expediency of teaching as facts, the fraudulent fables of the ’dark ages.’  To keep the people ignorant, or what is worse, to teach them only what is false, is the great end of their training; and if a British ministry propose anything better than the merest mockery of education, they call it ‘dangerous to faith and morals.’

The sage who writes ‘leaders’ for the Morning Herald, is of opinion that Ireland would indeed be ‘great, glorious, and free,’ if its Roman Catholic people were to cease all efforts for Repeal, and turn good Protestants.  But the Herald does greatly err not knowing human nature and the source of Irish evils.  It is not by substituting Protestantism for Romanism that those evils are to be cured.  Were every Romanist in Ireland at once to turn ‘good Protestant,’ their political emancipation would be far off as ever.  Protestantism everywhere, like Romanism everywhere, is ’a political system, and a wicked political system, for it regards only the exercise of power, and neglects utterly the duty of improvement.’