Pitt at once embraced the idea, and in the spring of the next year a
bill was introduced into the Irish Parliament by the Chief Secretary,
authorizing the foundation and endowment of a college at Maynooth, in
the neighborhood of Dublin, for the education of Roman Catholics
generally, whether destined for the Church or for lay professions. It is
a singular circumstance that the only opposition to the measure came
from Grattan and his party, who urged that, as the Roman Catholics had
recently been allowed to matriculate and take degrees at Trinity
College, though not to share in the endowments of that wealthy
institution, the endowment of another college, to be exclusively
confined to Roman Catholics, would be a retrograde step, undoing the
benefits of the recent concession of the authorities of Trinity; would
be "a revival and re-enactment of the principles of separation and
exclusion," and an injury to the whole community. For, as he wisely
contended, nothing was so important to the well-doing of the entire
people as the extinction of the religious animosities which had hitherto
embittered the feelings of each Church toward the other, and nothing
could so surely tend to that extinction as the uniting the members of
both from their earliest youth, in the pursuit both of knowledge and
amusement, as school-fellows and playmates.
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