University, to bring up and nourish in all sound learning as a mother gives nourishment to her children, those who were here- after to become graduates and members of the University.[1]
- ↑ Dr. Miller, in his " Examination
of the Charters and Statutes of Trin.
Coll." Bull. 1804, has suggested two
other significations of the phrase Mater Universitatis. " The precise mean-
ing of these words (he says) is not
fully ascertained. They may either
be understood to mean, that this
College was designed to be the go-
verning body of the University then
formed, and consequently to be pa-
ramount to all other Colleges or Halls,
which might afterwards be erected
within the same University ; or merely
to signify, that in the establishment
of this College, that of a new Univer-
sity was begun, this being the mother
or original College of the Institution.
But either meaning must require that the College, in its actual circum- stances, should be considered as the same with the University. Xo other CoUege having been erected on the same foundation, we must necessarily consider that College, which, accord- ing to the former meaning, was de- signed to be, in all cases that might occur, the paramount Corporation, as, in its separate existence, invested with supreme authority to regulate all its own concerns ; or, according to the latter, we must regard the ori- ginal College, as constituting the whole University, until some other College should have been erected on the same foundation, and a necessity should have occurred for introducing a new federal constitution, which might comprehend both under the authority of the Convocation of the whole University." — pp. 8-9. But this is surely a most confused and unsatisfactory explanation of the phrase. If Dr. Miller's first inter- pretation be adopted, namely, that the College was to be the governing or paramount College of all future Colleges, then it ought to have been called, not mater Universitatis, but mater Collegiorum postea eriffendo- rum ; or, if the meaning be that Queen Elizabeth's College was to be mother or original College of an In- stitution intended to consist of many Colleges, then Trinity College has never been in this sense (or only for a few years) the mother of an University. It is evident that on both explanations Dr. Miller ta- citly assumes the existence of more than one College as essential to an University, although he elsewhere refutes unanswerably that great mis- take. See his pamphlet, pp. lo-n. He farther says, that "• in either meaning" " the College, in its actual circumstances," i. e., as being the only College in the University, "should be considered as the same with the University." But is it not a most strange mode of expressing this, to say that the College is the mother of the University ? Is a mo- ther identical with her children ? Is the mother College, in the sense of being first founded, necessarily the
