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.

If the change that takes place in the mind and conscience of the individual is a slow and subtle process, what should we not expect when there is question of a nation?  Yes, the process is slow but it is sure.  The permeation of evolutionism into every domain of human thought is a recent and most striking illustration of it.  This fact stands out conspicuously on the pages of history.  “Lord Acton’s view of history,” said Shane Leslie, “was that ideas, not men or events, made the differences between one era and the next.”  The mind is always the storm centre of revolutions, the breeding ground of the most conflicting theories.  The great storms that sweep over humanity always gather on the high summits of religion and philosophy, blackening the mental horizon; sooner or later, they break out on the lower plains of the economic social and political world, spreading everywhere revolution and destruction.  The blasphemous Proudhon gave utterance to a great truth when he wrote:  “It is surprising how at the bottom of every political problem we always find some theology involved.”  We lay stress upon this aspect of universities, for, in our mind, from a catholic view-point, it is of the greatest importance in the discussion of the present issue.