m PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION GERALDINE HODGSON B.A. (TRIN. COLL., DUBLIN) SOMETIME COHDEN SCHOLAR OF NEWNHAM COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE MISTRESS OF METHOD AND LECTURER ON THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, BRISTOL EDINBURGH T. & T. CLARK, 38 GEORGE STREET 1 906 52189 " Ces lettres incorrigibles, qui s'etaient laisse toucher par la doctrine du Christ, mais conservaient au fond de leur ame les souvenirs et les admirations de leur jeunesse, et qui, tout en lisant I'tvangile, ne pouvaient entierement oublier qu'ils avaient commence par lire Homere et Cice'ron." G. BOISSIER. " My child, thou hast asked a perilous gift from God ; many out of undue love of knowledge have made shipwreck of their souls. " My father, if I learn to know God, I shall never offend Him ; for those only offend Him who know Him not. " Go, my son, remain firm in the faith, and the true science shall conduct thee on the road to Heaven." S. COMGALI., Abbot of Benchor and his pupil Luanus. "Nothing but innocency and knowledge can make the mind truly easy." BISHOP WILSON. Education Library lolo PREFACE THE aim of the following pages is to indicate the role played by the primitive Christians in education. Drane's Christian Schools and Christian Scholars is out of print, and not readily accessible to the general reader ; moreover, the account given there of the first five Christian centuries is brief and scanty. The excerpts from the Fathers have been taken from (1) The Select Library ofNicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, published by Messrs. Parker & Co. of Oxford in conjunction with the Christian Literature Company of New York ; and (2) from The Ante-Nicene Christian Library, published by Messrs. T. & T. Clark of Edinburgh ; and (3) from The Library of the Fathers, published by J. H. Parker of Oxford. Were the subject of the book theological, the Fathers could hardly have been used in translations ; but our appreciation of their treat- ment of learning, of their methods of instruction, of vi PREFACE their mode of discipline, of their general attitude in bringing up and forming young minds, does not depend on the right and subtle interpretation of a few words of disputed meaning. For the purposes of the historian of Education, the English transla- tions suffice, and are perhaps more convenient for the general run of students of this subject. What is true of the Fathers in this respect is true also of Quintilian. It is hoped that all other references to, borrowings from, and suggestions by writers on this or cognate subjects have been acknowledged in the text of the book. If objection be taken to the number of these, it may be said that the book is intended for the use of students, who for the most part have little time for independent research, and to whom the utility of a book depends upon its trustworthiness. If the authors be quoted accurately, students are not in doubt as to the origin of the statement or opinion. GERALDINE HODGSON. UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, BRISTOL. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE DATE. ROMAN EMPERORS. CHRISTIAN FATHERS. B.C. 27 Augustus. A.D. 14 Tiberius. James the Just, bishop of Jerusalem. 37 Caligula. 4i Claudius. 54 Nero. Ammianus (successor of S. Mark), bishop of Alexandria. 68 Galba. The death of S. Uarnabas the fOtho. Cyprian is variously esti- 69 J Vitellius. ( Vespasian. mated as having occurred in . 53, 56, 61, 76. 79 Titus. 8l Domitian. S. Clement of Rome, dates 96 Nerva. much disputed. 98 Trajan. S. Ignatius, ?-io7, bishop of Antioch. 117 Hadrian. 138 Antoninus Pius. S. Irenaeus, I4O(5)-2O2. 161 Marcus Aurelius. S. Polycarp, P-I7S ?. 180 Commodus. Clement of Alexandria, c. 160- nYrtinax. c. 215. '93 I Julianus. [Septimius Severus. Tertullian, 150-230. 211 Caracalla. S. Pantsenus, ?-2i6?. 217 Macrinus. Origen, 185-254. 218 Heliogabalus. VIM DATE. ROMAN EMPERORS. CHRISTIAN FATHBRS. A.D. 222 Alexander Severus. 235 Maximin. /Gordian I. S. Cyprian, 200-255. 1 Gordian n. 238 -< Pupienus. 1 Balbinus. I Gordian in. 244 Philippus. 249 Decius. 251 Gallus. 253 -J Valerian and Gal- [ lienus. 268 Claudius n. Eusebius, 265-340. 270 Aurelian. 275 Tacitus. ** /Florianus. 276 \Probus. 282 Carus. 283 Carinus. 284 Diocletian. 286 Maximian. 35 Constantius I. 300 Constantino the S. Cyril of ,[.,315-386. Great. S. Gregory Naz., 330-396. 340 Constantine n. S. Basil, 331-379- 350 Constan^ ^ ^ 8. Terome. rti-azo. , ( Constantius ii. S. Ambrose, 340-397. 3 or \Julian. S. Gregory of Nyssa, 343-396. 362 Jovian. S. Chrysostom, 344(7)-4O4. 364-375 Valentinian I. S. Theodore of Mopsuestia, 367-383 Gratian. 350-402. 375 Valentinian n. S. Augustine, 354-430. 392 Theodosius I. S. Cyril of Alexandria, 380-444. 395 Honorius. John Cassian, 360-435. 408 Theodosius 11. Hilary of Aries, 430-*:. 450. 423 John. Vincent of Lerins, 434-?. 425 Valentinian in. 455 Petronius Maximus. GREEK FATHERS Clement of Alexandria. S. Panteenus. Origen, Eusebius. Cyril of Jerusalem. Gregory Nazianzen. Basil. Gregory of Nyssa. Chrysostom. Theodore of Mopsuestia. Cyril of Alexandria. LATIN FATHERS Clement of Rome. Barnabas the Cyprian. Irenasus. Ignatius. Polycarp. Tertullian. Cyprian. Hilary of Poitiers. Jerome^ Ambrose. Augustine of Hippo. John Cassian. Hilary of Aries. Vincent of Lerins. CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION ... i CHAP. I. THE EVIDENCE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT . . 20 ^ II. EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITY IN THE EARLY CENTURIES 45 III. SCHOOLS UNDER THE ROMAN EMPIRE . . 73 IV. THE CATECHETICAL SYSTEM OF THE PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANS ...... 103 V. S. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA . . . 124 VI. S. CYRIL OF JERUSALEM .... 153 v VII. THE CHRISTIANS' ATTITUDE TO ROMAN LEARNING AND EDUCATION ..... 185 v* Y VIII. S. JEROME . . . 246 ADDENDUM. THE OCTAVIUS OF FELIX MINUCIUS 281 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION. INTRODUCTION. IT is doubtful whether the meaning of the word education is settled definitely even yet. Could a clear, fixed meaning once be attached to it authoritatively, some of the difficulties and contro- versies which encumber the subject might disappear automatically. Without attempting to determine the rival claims of etymology, which connect the word on the one hand with the Latin educere, to lead out, and on the other with the Latin educare, whose meaning is surmised to be to nourish, it is possible to arrive at a rough general estimate of the meaning of the word which would satisfy those who have reflected upon the means of the process, and the end to i 2 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION which they are, under the happiest conditions, directed. Education, viewed in this light, includes the development of the child's latent powers and the imparting of such portions of the experience of the race generally called knowledge as will help him to conduct successfully his journey "through the wilderness of this world " ; and it includes a method of so imparting this knowledge that the child really assimilates or mentally digests it, really makes it an integral part of himself. We should never forget Montaigne^s illuminating simile concerning the un- skilful teacher, likened by him to the birds of the air living about his chateau : l " Even as birds flutter and skip from field to field to picke up corne or anie graine, and without tasting the same carrie it in their bills, therewith to feed their little ones ; so doe our pedantes gleane and pick learning from books, and never lodge It further than their lips, only to degorge and cast it to the wind." The term latent powers is vague. It certainly includes what we call intellectual powers : as certainly it includes moral powers : and in the estimation of most people interested in education it does not exclude the religious sense as specifically differentiated from the moral. The work of development, of course, 1 Florio's Montaigne, i. xxiv. INTRODUCTION 3 implies training. Perhaps the educator's task could be described still more briefly and succinctly as a blending of guidance and instruction. Of late years attention and interest have been directed to the History of Education. To the present writer it seems that scant notice has been accorded, at any rate in England, to the work of the early Christians in this sphere; and that some criticism which has been made there and in France is unfair. To take the: latter first, M. Compayre draws with great dabs and splashes of sombre colour a dismal picture of the Catholic Church's contri- bution to this work. I translate and append four passages from the French edition of his Histoire cle la Pedagogic : (1) P. 50 : " In their struggles against the antique world, the primitive Christians came at last to con- found classic literature and the pagan religion in one common detestation." (2) P. 51 : " At the outset, owing to its tendencies towards mysticism, Christianity could not be a good school of practical and human pedagogy.' 1 (It should be noticed that in this passage Compayre passes on from literature to speak of education.) " The Christian lived detached from the life of the world, in order to gain entrance to the City of God. He was required to break off all connection with a 4 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION corrupt and perverse world. He was required by means of fasting and the renunciation of every pleasure to make a protest against the immorality of Greco-Roman Society." (How this last require- ment, even if it were approximately applicable to the lay majority of the Christian community, must militate against classical learning of every kind is not apparent.) (3) Ibid. " The celebrated Fathers, who by their erudition and eloquence, if not by their taste, shed lustre on the birth of Christianity, were either jealous mystics, sectaries in whose eyes philosophic curiosity was a sin ; or conciliatory Christians, who in some measure united religious faith to a love of letters." It must be admitted that Compayre lays most stress on the former of these two classes. (4) P. 55 : " If the early Fathers of the Church showed some occasional sympathy for profane literature, it was owing to the fact that in their unbaptized youth they had frequented pagan schools. But when those schools were once closed, Christianity did not open new ones, and after the fourth century profound night wraps humanity." Putting all these passages together, it is not too much to say that M. Compayre attributes to UK- primitive Church hatred of the classics and such a c INTRODUCTION 5 complete disregard for education as led men to acquiesce in the closing of the old schools, which were not replaced by new ones. M. Compayre gives no list of authorities whom he may have consulted. In the light of the foregoing extracts it seems legitimate to conclude that he had not read Drane^s Christian Schools and Christian Scholars. Had he done so, he must surely have come to other con- clusions, or have spent some time and trouble in refuting Drane's statements. Had he studied and accepted the account given there of learning in Ireland from the fourth century to the Carlovingian age, of the labours of S. Boniface, of Charlemagne, and Alcuin; had he read Drane's account of the tenth century, called by Baronius iron, leaden, and dark, he surely could not have written in such an unqualified fashion that "after the fourth century profound night wraps humanity." Too little credit has been given generally to Irish Churchmen for their work in education. S. Columban, a pupil of the monastery of Bangor, founded the monastery of Bobbio in Italy, after- wards so famous. MSS. of great value were collected here ; in the seventeenth century some were removed to the Ambrosian Library in Milan, others to the Vatican Library. Another Irishman, Gallus, founded, on the shores of Lake Constance, the monastery of 6 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION S. Gallen, of which (though Compayre writes con- temptuously of the learning of its monks in the eleventh century) Dr. Sandys 1 observes that it " has proved no less important than that of Bobbio as a treasure - house of Latin as well as Irish literature." The Irish cared for Greek, while they did not neglect Latin or their own native literature. " The knowledge of Greek," writes Dr. Sandys, 2 " which had almost vanished in the West, was so widely diffused in the schools of Ireland, that if anyone knew Greek it was assumed that he must have come from that country. The Irish passion for travel led to the light of learning, which had lingered in the remotest Island of the West, being transmitted anew to the lands of the South." In the seventh century, Greek had not vanished in Spain : its study is connected with the name of Isidore of Seville, and Julian, bishop of Toledo. In the same century it is said of the Library of Liguge in Gaul, that most of the Greek and Latin Fathers could be found therein. Again, the learning of Byzantium cannot be overlooked entirely, nor that of the Arabs and Jews who worked in Spain. The fact is that the lamp of learning never went out in 1 History of Classical Scholarship, vol. i. p. 441. 2 Ibid. p. 438. INTRODUCTION 7 Europe after the birth of Christ. It is not a pro- found night : though the sky may be dark at times, it is lit with solitary far-shining stars. Drane passes quickly over the first five centuries : so the business of the following pages will be to describe their educational activity as it appeared in typical or particularly striking instances. The slight foregoing defence of the centuries after the fourth was elicited by the dogmatism of Compayre's criticism. In his depreciation of the primitive Christians, he can be matched by English writers who deliver themselves in a similar strain. Hallam, for example, makes some severe strictures on the primitive Church. It seems best, on the whole, to quote them almost in their entirety. Speaking of " the neglect of heathen literature by the Christian Church," he writes: 1 " I am not versed enough in ecclesiastical writers to estimate the degree of this neglect, nor am I disposed to deny that the mischief was beyond recovery before the accession of Constantine. From the primitive ages, however, it seems that ajlislike of pagan learn-^ ing was pretty general among Christians. Many of the Fathers were undoubtedly accomplished in liberal studies, and we are indebted to them for valuable fragments of authors whom we have lost. But the literary character of the Church is not to 1 Middle Ages, chap. ix. pt. I. 8 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION be measured by that of its more illustrious leaders. Proscribed and persecuted, the early Christians had not perhaps access to the public schools, nor incli- nation to studies, which seemed, very excusably, uncongenial to the character of their profession. Their prejudices, however, survived the establishment of Christianity. The fourth Council of Carthage in 398 prohibited the reading of secular books by bishops. Jerome plainly condemns the study of them except for pious ends. All physical science especially was held in avowed contempt as incon- sistent with revealed truths. Nor do there appear to have been any canons made in favour of learning, or any restriction on the ordination of persons absolutely illiterate. There was indeed abundance of what is called theological learning displayed in the controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries. And those who admire such disputations may con- sider the principal champions in them as contributing to the glory, or at least retarding the decline, of literature. But I believe rather that polemical disputes will be found not only to corrupt the genuine spirit of religion, but to degrade and con- tract the faculties. ... It cannot be doubted that the controversies agitated in the Church during these two centuries must have diverted studious minds from profane literature, and narrowed more INTRODUCTION 9 and more the circles of that knowledge which they were desirous to attain." The following are the chief points of attack in this passage : (1) That the literary character of the Church as a whole may not be measured by the attainments of its more illustrious members. (2) That the early Christians showed a dis- inclination for profane learning. (3) That a council prohibited bishops from read- ing secular books. (4) That Jerome condemns the study of classical authors save for pious ends. (5) That no canons in favour of learning were promulgated. (6) That illiterates might receive ordination. (7) That religious controversy tends to narrow rather than to extend learning. It is hardly too much to say that the general trend of Hallam's remarks here is adverse to the Church. In a similar vein J. A. Symonds criticises the attitude of the Church to learning, Writing of the time "long before the fall of the Roman Empire," he gives no precise date, 1 he observes : "The Church while battling with paganism recog- nised her deadliest foes in literature. Not only were the Greek and Latin masterpieces the stronghold of 1 Renaissance t vol. ii. pp. 42, 43. 10 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION a mythology which had to be erased from the popular mind, not only was their morality antagon- istic to the principles of Christian ethics : in addition to these grounds for hatred and distrust, the classics idealised a form of life which the new faith regarded as worthless. What was culture in comparison with the salvation of the soul ? " (It is perhaps permis- sible to break in here to make the suggestion that this last question is an admirable example of the logical fallacy known as the opposition of false opposites. Symonds cannot surely ask us seriously to believe that culture and a soul's salvation are necessary incompatibles.) "Why should time be spent on the dreams of poets, when every minute might be well employed in pondering the precepts of the gospel ? What was the use of making this life refined and agreeable by study when it formed but an insignificant prelude to an eternity wherein mundane learning would be valueless ? Why raise questions about man's condition on this earth when the creeds had to be defined and expounded, when , the nature of God and the relation of the human soul to its Creator had to be established ? It was easy to pass from this state of mind to the belief that learning itself was impious."" It is difficult to settle from the passage which follows immediately on this quotation to which age Mr. Symonds refers ; INTRODUCTION 11 he may have passed unconsciously from primitive times to those which are called with convenient vagueness the Middle Ages. But since he began it all with the phrase " long before the fall of the Roman Empire," and afterwards quotes Augustine of Hippo 354 to 430 A.D. (who, by the way, had a flourishing cathedral school), and as he also quotes Gregory of Tours c. 538 to 594, we may conclude that he is thinking of the primitive, not of the mediaeval Church. In a footnote he acknowledges his debt for most of the quotations which he makes to Comparetti, Virgilio net Medio Evo, vol. i., " a work of sound scholarship and refined taste upon the place of Virgil in the Middle Ages." It is this footnote which breeds doubt concerning the period of which he is writing. A more general indictment, which, however, so ample is its grasp, might be stretched to cover education, is contained in Gibbon's observation: "But it was not in this world that the primitive Christians were desirous of making themselves either agreeable or useful" (Decline and Fall, chap. xv.). That it is not in the least unfair to apply the above, at any rate in part, to education, is proved by Gibbon's next sentence : " The acquisition of knowledge, the exercise of our reason or fancy, and the cheerful flow of unguarded conversation 12 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION may employ the leisure of a liberal mind. Such amusements, however, were rejected with abhorrence, or admitted with the utmost caution by the severity of the Fathers, who despised all knowledge that was not useful to salvation, and who considered all levity of discourse as a criminal abuse of the gift of speech." The temptation to anticipate the matter of a later chapter by recalling S. Gregory Nazianzen's description of S. Basil is irresistible : " Who was so pleasant when you met him, as I know, who have had the largest experience ? Who was more kindly in his stories, more refined in his wit? . . . His reproofs gave rise to no arrogance, his relaxation to no dissipation ; but avoiding excess in either, he made use of both in reason and season, according to the rules of Solomon, who assigns to every business a season" (Panegyric on S. Basil, by S. Gregory Nazianzen). That S. Basil's practice of amiable demeanour and intercourse issued from deliberate thought is suggested by a passage in one of his letters to S. Gregory, where he writes: " One should reflect first what one is going to say, and then give it utterance ; be courteous when addressed, amiable in social intercourse " (S. Basics Letters, ii.). A striking contrast to such criticisms as Gibbon's INTRODUCTION 13 and the rest quoted above, may be found in the few sentences, summing up the position of the Catholic Church, which are scattered through Professor Sidgwick's Development of European Polity. For example, on p. 18 we read : " I shall show how the Church, strong in its intellectual predominance, and gaining an intenser corporate life from its successful struggle with disintegrating forces within and without, made its great attempt to bring Europe under ecclesiastical domination. 1 ". This passage refers to the Church of the fifth century and of the centuries immediately succeeding that. Well, an organisation does not become "strong in intellectual predominance" in a short period. The Church of the fifth century must have owed some- thing to the primitive Fathers. It is quite true that on p. 197 Professor Sidgwick writes : " The Church itself suffered a partial lapse into barbarism. 11 That remark refers apparently to the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries. But we notice the word lapse, which implies a position to lapse from ; also Professor Sidgwick speaks of a " partial lapse," not of " a profound night wrapping humanity." Still more definitely on p. 223 he writes : " When Q the Empire broke up, the Church held together./ It was again to use an ecclesiastical simile a/ kind of ark in which civilisation was earned across) 14 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION the disorder of the first five centuries after the barbarian invasion." The period mentioned in this quotation began in the days of the primitive Church and ended in the Middle Ages. Writing still of the disorderly times which followed the barbarian impact on the decaying Roman Empire, Professor Sidgwick thus describes the newly formed imperium in imperio, the Christian community : " The Church, strong in . its cohesive organisation, conscious of its complete intellectual superiority to the barbarian invaders, possessing in its teaching and ceremonial the one mode of intellectual influence capable of powerfully impressing their rude minds, and gaining fresh vigour from its successful struggle with disorder, made itself a place of the first importance in the barbarian kingdoms formed out of the break-up of the Roman Empire, and out of the Teutonic nations outside, over which its sway was gradually ^extended." This passage surely implies that the primitive Church, the Church in the earliest centuries, must have cared for learning and for intellectual training ; for these are not gained quickly, nor can any human power create them in a highly developed condition all at once. Had the leaders of the Church dis- dained so wholly, as some represent them to have INTRODUCTION 15 done, everything which did not bear directly upon religious life, they could not, that is, the Church could not, have been so " conscious of its complete^/, intellectual superiority to the barbarian invaders." Yet, after all, a comparison of rival critics will never issue in so satisfactory a form of truth, as a study of contemporary witnesses will. In the following pages, therefore, an attempt will be made to discover the aims, and the means of achieving them, pursued by some of those primitive Christians whose writings remain. Since the History of Education is now receiving considerable attention, an account of these early centuries is not altogether , superfluous. It seems best to keep the issue as comprehensive as possible : for it may be that the charge has gained weight from human narrowness. If the Fathers 1 claim to educational eminence, or even to educational capacity, is to rest on their general attitude to classical literature, it is doubtful if the criticism of Compayre and the rest would not, . even so, appear grossly exaggerated. But if we ask VI he larger question, "What, apart from classical lc;iniing, was the disciplinary or educational aspect of their whole system ? or, to express it otherwise, Could they prepare men and women for that kingdom of heaven on which Symonds and Compayre 16 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION seem to fancy their eyes were fixed so exclusively, without in some measure preparing them also for a strenuous and useful career in this world ? if we ask this larger question, the answer, in spite of Gibbon's sarcasm, would almost infallibly redound to the greater glory of the Fathers. And then, lastly, there is an altogethei^wider way of looking at the whole matter, the view of general human development, of the process (an educational process, if we interpret the adjective in its widest sense) by which different eras, different races, different communities and societies of human beings contribute their several quotas to the world's ex- panding life : the theory which Browning puts into the mouth of Cleon when, in reply to the tyrant Protus, the poet suggests the possibility of "what we call this life of men on earth, This sequence of the soul's achievements here Being, as I find much reason to conceive, Intended to be viewed eventually As a great whole, not analysed to parts, But each part having reference to all." If this view be adopted, then instead of exalting one at the expense of the other, instead of com- plaining that Plato, Virgil, and Cicero cared so little for and contributed so little to physical science that it did not occur to them to construct the Nile INTRODUCTION 17 Barrage or investigate the properties of radium, which, after all, is quite as reasonable as blaming the primitive Christians because they were not, above all else, enthusiastic Platonists and Ciceronians ; or censuring the Italian and French Humanists of the Renaissances for reading the classics instead of confining their whole attention to the Catholic Fathers ; instead, to put the thing in general terms, of blaming each set of human beings in turn because they performed what seemed to them to be their own task and not that of someone else instead of such unprofitable criticising, men may begin at last really to comprehend and appreciate " The worth, both absolute and relative, Of all his children from the birth of time, His instruments for all appointed work." In his England in Egypt , Lord Milner gives an interesting account of the way in which Sir Evelyn Wood and twenty-six other British officers recon- stituted the native Egyptian Army after 1884. Those officers did not proceed along purely intel- lectual lines; they did not busy themselves in introducing thefellahin to any literature, classical, English, or otherwise. They turned their attention to matters of discipline and character; they suc- ceeded in their aim, and men have not blamed their 2 18 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION disregard of letters. The Christian Church had a task set before it not dissimilar to that which con- fronted Sir Evelyn Wood and his co-workers : they had to reconstruct the ideal of men and women. They, too, turned their attention to discipline and character; but they have been less fortunate than that handful of British officers, for they have been blamed severely, and to some extent groundlessly, because they did not use strictly intellectual means more exclusively than seemed wise to them, the men who after all were on the spot, at close quarters with circumstances of appalling moment. For the practical educator of the twentieth century it can hardly be doubted which of all these methods of criticism is the best. The widest view will almost certainly issue in the soundest conclusion ; the most tolerant critical attitude is probably the wisest way of approach to that long line of men and women who have in the course of the Christian centuries written upon education. For, if a study of this subject indicates one truth more plainly than another, it is the fact that as there is nothing new under the sun, so, in the sphere of ideas, nothing new is urgently essential. There is enough wisdom and even to spare, in our forefathers' outlook, to serve us, if we only look for it, and select those parts of it which are most INTRODUCTION 19 germane to our particular needs. The wider our reading, the more convinced we shall grow of the difficult y of finding the true beginning of any human thought. Let it be what it will, we meet it again and again, in embryo, or fully developed. We see it fall dead time after time ; we see it drop on unreceptive ground, or carried away by the birds of the air; until, at last, one comes, who with dexterous phrase and convincing force wins an entry for the good seed of a fruitful thought. To provide material whereby adverse criticisms of Christian educational effort may be met; to treat the subject in its narrower and also in its' 3 wider aspect ; to draw a picture which, if imperfect, shall at any rate not be wilfully or carelessly false, of primitive Christian education, is the object of the following pages. CHAPTER I. THE EVIDENCE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. MR. QUICK once called the Book of Proverbs an " early treatise on education " ; and, unusual though the view may be, there is much in that wonderful collection of wise sayings to recommend the remark as just and justifiable. The same character cannot_ be claimed for the contents of the New Testament; or, at any rate, it cannot be claimed with anything approaching to the same degree of truth. Never- theless, traces of the primitive Christian attitude to pagan learning, of its social theory, and of that wider disciplinary training of mental outlook and moral character, referred to in the Introduction as being certainly an element in education, may be found ; vague and elusive but still visible, these exist in the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles to the early Churches. Since the New Testament is within the reach of all who can read, it is 20 EVIDENCE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 21 convenient to consider it before a beginning is made on more remote sources of information. Christianity, "this strange history of a crucified God, 11 as J. S. Mill called it, proved a powerful solvent of many received ideas and accepted customs ; but it never left humanity again without a definite if distant goal, and a system of life whereby that goal might be achieved eventually, and even in part and gradually in this present state. This simple fact is important educationally, for an end implies means ; and means, being used, must, for good or for ill, educate those who use them. Until the results of the Higher Criticism are more definitely established and settled than they are at present, it seems convenient and even necessary to speak of the Apostles and Evangelists, and of the rest of the primitive Christians, as the authors and doers of the words and deeds hitherto ascribed to them, simply because this present inquiry aims at discovering what the theory and practice with regard to learning and education of the primitive Christians really were. It matters little to that inquiry whether S. Paul's Epistles were written by him or "by another man of the same name, 11 if they were written in and represent the views of primitive Christian times. Again, it matters little whether S. Clement of Alexandria 22 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION was or was not head of the Catechetical School, so long as some learned pagan-turned-Christian did and said the words and actions commonly assigned to that great man. So long as the works appealed to in this book represent fairly and truly the primitive Christian outlook on life, that suffices; and therefore without trenching on controversial matters, or expressing a worthless opinion about them, the present writer will prefer to write S. Paul says or was this, and S. Clement and S. Cyril said or did that, taking the accepted view, but all the while basing the argument on the pertinent fact that it is a primitive Christian opinion or deed ; a position which, so far, appears not to have been challenged. S. Paul then, as we are accustomed to say, was a learned man. It is quite unnecessary to labour the matter. It is true that the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers called him a "babbler'"; but that was rather because they disliked the matter of his discourse than because they impugned the form in which it was cast ; they certainly conveyed him to the Areopagus in order that he might deliver that great speech, which apparently owed some of its power to the "rhetoric" which the Apostle had gained in his native school at Tarsus, and afterwards from Gamaliel, when, agree- EVIDENCE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 23 ably to the native custom, he proceeded from the somewhat elementary school of his own city to a more advanced centre of learning. S. Paul^ it will -^ be remembered, reminded King Agrippa of the extreme orthodoxy of his training. Had he, in his Christian days, revolted against that acquaint- ance with classic writers which his education in "the straitest sect of our religion" (the Jewish religion, of course) had still allowed, it is hardly likely that he would in his writings have quoted these same "to point a moral." And this, as is well known, he did three times ; once on Mars Hill, from the works of his fellow- townsman, Aratus, " for we are also His (God's) offspring " ; l a second time from Menander (from a comedian, too, this time) when he was writing to the Corinthian Church, " evil communications corrupt good manners " ; 2 and yet a third time, to the well-beloved Titus, bishop of Crete, from Epimenides, the epic poet of Crete, " Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, idle gluttons." 3 And to Epimenides, S. Paul pays the emphatic tribute, " This testimony is true." Had primitive Christians and primitive Christian education, undeveloped as it doubtless was, had no time to spare for anything outside the immediate circle of their religion, no student of human nature 1 Acts xvii. 28. 2 i Cor. xv. 33. 3 Tit. i. 12 (K.V.). 24 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION need have felt surprise. Lessons of width, of comprehension, of conciliatory tolerance cannot be learned quickly. If, in the dawn of the Faith, its novelty, its engrossing interest, its dominant claim on a man's heart, had eclipsed all other aims and interests, there would have been no ground for astonishment. Ages, like individuals, have a ten- dency towards total absorption in a single idea and its corollaries, as the history of the Italian Renais- sance sufficiently shows. That phenomenon seems natural enough, partly, perhaps, because of its com- parative unfamiliarity. And similarly we might feel the naturalness of a Christianas absorption in the new creed, if so many centuries of repetition had not blunted men's senses. If the novelty of it were not destroyed, it would be rather a cause for wonder that with that insistent call ringing in their ears " What shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul ? " men did not more generally feel that the distinction between "the world " and " the soul," between the " Kingdom of Heaven" and the actual visible Roman Empire, was absolute. And further, when we remember how startling were the circumstances which changed Saul of Tarsus into the Apostle of the Gentiles (for his was no slow probation while ignorance and wonder EVIDENCE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 25 passed with many a stumble and slip into intelligent discipleship), and how sudden was his response : "Wherefore ... I was not disobedient unto -the heavenly vision 11 ; and yet how lasting, as all his life was lived and all his arguments were based on the reality testified to by that Vision; when we remember all that, it seems no small evidence of his intellectual width that he should have retained, apt and ready, the weapons polished by his early training. S. Paul's education in pagan literature ' t ' . * . ii and philosophy combined, perhaps with his later experience, to teach him that comprehensiveness which most men learn so slowly, to show him that, after all, there are different ways of accomplishing the same task, several avenues to the one goal. That certain members of the early Christian com- munity lacked his mental width no one need be concerned to deny ; since surely that is indicated in the storied Vision by which the impetuous Peter was taught not to call common or unclean that which God had cleansed. From the glimpses of social theory which the New Testament affords, the student gathers that the Gospel of Humanity cut at the root of those class-distlnctiong on which the City-States of Greece and the Roman Empire were based; distinctions which, with the exception of nominal slavery, exist 26 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION again in Christian States now. The general social attitude of the primitive Christians, which is interesting because it must have tinged their prac- tical education, appears in S. Paul's phrase "In one Spirit were we all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, whether bond or free."" 1 In a similar strain he writes : " There is " (the R.V. has the stronger expression "can be," and Dr. Lightfoot prefers " is room for ") " neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female ; for ye are all one " (R.V. "one man") "in Christ Jesus." 2 S. Clement of Alexandria, after quoting the above passage, adds, "There are not then in the same Word some ' illuminated ' (Gnostics), and some ' animal ' (or natural) men ; but all who have abandoned the desires of the flesh are equal and spiritual before the Lord." 3 Here, clearly, racial distinctions and class differ- ences are lost in a new equality, a new undivided interest of universal citizenship. S. Paul's pleading for the truant slave, which is as far away from Aristotle's theory of "natural slavery" as from current Greek and Roman practice, is another proof of the Christian view : " I beseech thee for my child 1 I Cor. xii. 13. 2 Gal. iii. 28. 3 The Pedagogue, bk. I. EVIDENCE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 27 Onesimus . . . whom I sent back to thee. . . . l For perhaps he was therefore parted from thee for a season, that thou shouldst have him for ever, no longer as a bond-servant, but more than a bond-servant, a brother beloved. 11 At the same time it should be remembered that this new social equality would not introduce so unfamiliar an element into education as into some other spheres of the life of the State, because intellectual training was not wholly beyond the reach of slaves in Imperial Rome : " In the Roman Empire the slave was for the most part of the same colour and prac- tically of the same race as his master. No attempt was ever made to prevent his education ; on the contrary, skill in a handicraft, in the management of business, in art, even in erudition and intellectual accomplishments generally, was held greatly to increase his market value 11 (Bigg, The Churches Task under the Empire, p. 112). Dr. Sandys bears similar testimony to the intel- lectual advantages which Roman slaves might enjoy : " A name of note in the history of Latin Grammar is that of Quintus Remmius Palaemon (fl. 35-70 A.D.) of Vicentia. By birth a slave and by trade a weaver, he learnt the elements of literature while accompanying his master's son on his way to school ; 1 The Epistle of S. Paul to Philemon, 10-16 (R.V.) 28 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION and after obtaining his freedom he held a foremost place among teachers of Grammar at Rome" (A History of Classical Scholarship, vol. i. p. 188). Viewed, however, from another aspect, the demo- cT.ilic spirit of Christianity was not without influence in the region of education. Though the slave was not debarred from seeking and obtaining knowledge, Roman thought appears to have acquiesced con- tentedly in the ignorance of the masses (in which were included a great number of women), more con- tentedly, at any rate, than the detractors of Christian education would suggest. 1 Neander, drawing atten- tion to the " opposition " noticed by Polybius between the subjective " condition of individuals and the public State religion " of Rome, goes on to remark, a few lines later: "With Polybius agrees Strabo the geographer, who wrote in the age of Augustus Caesar. ' The multitude of women,' he observes, ' and the entire mass of the common people, cannot be led to piety by the doctrines of philosophy ; for this purpose superstition also is necessary, which must call in the aid of myths and tales of wonder. 1 Having adduced some examples from the Grecian mythology, he adds, 'such things the founders of States employed as bugbears to awe childish people. 1 These myths, as it seemed to him, were required 1 General Church History, vol. i. p. 9. EVIDENCE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 29 not only for children, but no less for the ignorant and uneducated, who are no better than children ; and so, too, for those whose education is imperfect, for in their case, too, reason has not yet acquired strength enough to throw off the habits they have brought with them from the years of child- hood." It may be argued that if the Romans were satisfied that the learned should hold one position and the ignorant another in religious matters, yet the primitive Christians adopted a similar practice of economy of truth. Cardinal Newman, writing of the Catechetical School of Alexandria, and of S. Clement's avowed practice of fitting his remarks to the " sharpsighted and sincere, 11 and " baffling the perverse," observes : " The Fathers considered that they had the pattern as well as the recommendation of this procedure in Scripture itself. This self- restraint and abstinence, practised at least partially by the Primitive Church in the publication of her most sacred doctrines of our religion, are termed in theological language the disciplina arcani."" 1 But the Christian method was a sounder educational plan than the Roman of desiring the ignorant to believe in the gods, in all the crude materialism of the most popular rendering of the old mythology, 1 A r tans of the Fourth Century, ist ed. p. 29. 30 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION while the philosophers and the educated did otherwise, for this simple reason, that (to quote Newman again) " the elementary information given to the heathen or catechumens was in no sense undone by the subsequent secret teaching, which was in fact but a filling up of a bare but correct outline. 1 ' 3 More interesting, however, to the historian of education than the new social spirit are, perhaps, the traces to be found in the New Testament of the early Christian view of disciplinary training. If the Greeks esteemed temperance "the regular order of the soul," 2 the Apostles attached supreme value to self- mastery, which is similar if not absolutely identical. S. Paul regards subjection to authority an element in self-mastery not easily won as a universal necessity : " Let every soul be in sub- jection to the higher powers "; 3 while the Church, as a whole, is, of course, regarded as specially subject to Christ. Before psychology was differentiated from metaphysics, S. Paul was aware of the dual personality in man : " So then with the mind, I myself serve the law of God ; but with the flesh the law of sin." 4 This emphatic identification of the real man, the ego, with the intellectual organ, is 1 Arians of the Fourth Century, p. 31. ~ Gorgias, 504. 3 Rom. xiii. I. 4 Rom. vii. 25. EVIDENCE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 31 another Christian tribute to the importance of the mind. Of his insistence upon self-discipline, upon overcoming the lower self, it cannot be necessary to remind readers of his First Epistle to the Corinthians : " But I keep under " (literally, bruise) " my body and bring it into subjection, lest that by any means when I have preached unto others, I myself should be a castaway." l This passage is not only unique, perhaps, among S. PauPs utterances in the poignancy of its pathos, but it indicates the importance he attached to self- mastery ; because obviously it is this that he has preached to the whole body the word preach is also rendered " been herald to " ; so that S. Paul is saying that he has issued a trumpet call, as it were, to the Christian community, beckoning them away from sloth and self-indulgence to energy and self- restraint. Again, writing to S. Timothy, S. Paul ur^es, as a point of order in the Christian community, the subjection of woman to man, of children to parents. On this latter point the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews also lays stress. 2 There is another Apostle who maintains the necessity of discipline ; with him it is a universal discipline, which will issue at last in a mutual subjection of all the members throughout the 1 1 Cor. \z. 27. 2 Heb. xii. 9. 32 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION community. It is a commonplace of moralists, used dramatically by George Eliot in Romola, that each of us in a crisis will, in all probability, be very much what all our daily, seemingly trivial and unimportant, habits have been making us, silently, gradually, and unknown to ourselves. S. Peter, who at the moment of cock-crow, when he went out and wept bitterly, learned the hardest of human lessons, the irremediable pain of remorse, must have realised, never again to forget it, the all-essentialness of winning self-mastery day by day and inch by hard- fought inch. And so we should expect to find him, as we do, urging Christian men to learn to subdue the natural self: "Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear. . . . For this is worthy, if a man for conscience 1 sake towards God endure grief, suffering wrongfully. . . . For even hereunto were ye called : because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example. 11 x While S. Peter is thus careful for conscientious obedience, as distinct from servility, in the Christian household (for the word servants is rendered "household servants" in the R.V.), he goes on to apply the rule to the whole Christian community : obedience to authority is no class mark, but the distinction of the Christian man, no matter what 1 i Pet. ii. 18. EVIDENCE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 33 his position or function ; not only is each to govern himself, to attain self-mastery, but the several units are to yield to one another, a yet harder matter: "All of you be subject one to another"; 1 or, as some commentators read, " Be clothed with humility one towards another." And, lastly, S. Peter passes from the Church in its imperfect beginnings to the Church in perfection and completeness ; his thoughts travel on to an ordered subjection obtaining in the heavenly places, as if he fancied that even there self-mastery and mutual submission might find a sphere for exercise : " Jesus Christ " ; " Who is gone into heaven, and is on the right hand of God ; angels and authorities and powers being made subject unto Him." 2 Instances might be multiplied ; but the above are sufficient to prove that self-discipline was a rule of the primitive Church, a rule often translated into extreme practice. How important an element discipline is in education, we may gather from the words of the judicious Locke : " As the strength of the Body lies chiefly in being able to endure' hardships, so also does that of the Mind. And the great Principle and Foundation of all Virtue and Worth is plac'd in this, that a Man is able to deny himself his own desires, cross his own inclina- 1 i Pet. v. 8. - i Pet. iii. 22. 3 34 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION tions, and purely follow what Reason directs us best, tho 1 the Appetite lean the other way. 11 1 We are ready enough to admire the self-mastery of the Spartans; the world applauds ore rotundo when whole Japanese regiments, in a spirit of utter self-abnegation, fling themselves on certain death ; men never weary in attributing the decline of the Roman Empire to the increase of self-indulgence. But this warmth of admiration is apt to cool strangely when the scene changes to that of the primitive Church, as it strove by example and precept to discipline its members, drawn as they were from so many races, from such diverse classes, exhibiting such variety of capacity ; as it strove to inculcate the grace of self-mastery, even of self- sacrifice if need arose. But setting aside discipline, that so necessary part of any successful scheme of education, we may ask what traces we can find in the New Testament of care for intellectual instruction among the early Christians ? Well, S. Paul, at any rate, did not expect "the fellow-citizens with the saints 112 to acquiesce in a dead level of stupidity and complacent ignorance ; his aim was to organise men's gifts so as to make the utmost use of them for the common good, that 1 Thoughts concerning Education, 33. - Eph. ii. 19. EVIDENCE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 35 common general good from which he was so scrupu- lous to exclude no single man. If this be not so, why did he write to the Ephesians of the diversity of occupations, corresponding to the variety of gifts, in the Church ? " Some to be apostles, and some prophets, and some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers . . . till we all come unto the unity of the faith." l EphesUs, it is true, was a wealthy, rather than a learned city; Dr. Bigg reckons Athens, Alexandria, Rome, and Constantinople as "the University towns of the Empire 1 '; 2 he adds Berytus (the modern Beirout) as a law school. But there was an excellent reason why S. Paul should desire sound teaching and honest learners to abound there, why he should hope that "we may be no longer children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine." First of all, so acute an observer of human nature as the Apostle of the Gentiles could hardly have witnessed the scene stirred up by the suggestions of Demetrius the silversmith without perceiving that Ephesus was fruitful soil for the growth of that ignorant obstinacy which declines either to listen to argu- ment pr to search for truth : " When they per- ceived that he was a Jew. all with one voice about 1 Eph. iv. 11-13. - The ChnrcKs Task under an Empire, p. 3. 36 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION the space of two hours cried out, Great is Diana of the Ephesians."" l As a more or less natural consequence of that attitude of mind, Ephesus was a centre of heresy, more particularly it appears of that known as Gnosticism. Though nothing is known certainly of the date when this philosophy arose, references to it are thought to exist in the Epistle to the Colossians (e.g. Col. ii. 8), as well as in those to Timothy and Titus. The founder of the Gnostic sect has not been discovered. If we accept the dictum of S. Cyril of Jerusalem, "the inventor of all heresy was Simon Magus," 2 or that of S. Irenaeus, "from this Simon of Samaria all kinds of heresies derive their origin,"" we must attribute Gnosticism to him with the rest. After S. Paul's time, Basilides was a/noted Gnostic leader in the reign of Hadrian (117-138). Who- ever its founder may have been, it is not disputed that it became rife in Ephesus. Dr. Bigg (The Church? s Task under the Empire, pp. 60 et seq.) has some interesting remarks on it. The kernel of the heresy was its pretension to a deeper, more occult knowledge of God and the mysteries of life and mind than was possessed by other philosophic and religious systems. The contemporary account 1 Acts xix. 34 (R.V.). - Catechet. sec. vi. 14. EVIDENCE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 37 of it is that of S. Irenaeus, detailed and strangely interesting, in the first book of his treatise Against Heresies. Two quotations must suffice here : " They tell us, however, that all this knowledge has not been openly divulged, because all are not capable of receiving it, but has been mystically revealed through the Saviour through means of parables to those qualified for understanding it." l After giving a number of examples of their in- genuity in extracting their own particular and peculiar interpretations from the Gospel story, Irenaeus adds : " It is not only from the writings of the evangelists and apostles that they endeavour to derive proofs for their opinions by means of perverse interpretations and deceitful expositions : they deal in the same way with the Law and the Prophets, which contain many parables and allegories that can fre- quently be drawn into various senses, according to the kind of exegesis to which they are subjected." 2 That the Christians repudiated the Gnostics is clear from the above passages, and still more so from the following words of S. Cyril : " Abhor those above mentioned Gnostics, men of knowledge by name, but fraught with ignorance."" Here it is to our present purpose to notice that as with S. Paul so with S. Cyril, we find no slur cast upon 1 Book I. chap. iii. I. J Book I. chap. iii. 6. 38 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION learning, only condemnation of false learning ; " winds of doctrine " in S. Paul's words ; " men of knowledge by name," but " fraught with ignorance " in S. Cyril's. The whole trend of S._ Paul's counsel to the Ephesian Church seems, indeed, to favour education, in a wide sense of that word ; it seems to advocate teaching of a broad kind, for evangelists, pastors, and teachers are differentiated carefully, and his purpose apparently was to enable everj member to hold on fast to the truth and resist false philosophy. Theology was not so highly developed nineteen centuries ago us it is to-day ; but philo- sophy, which was surely its handmaid then as it should be and often is now, was, with the exception of psychology, very little less matured then than now ; wherefore S. Paul, the scholar of Tarsus, the , pupil of Gamaliel, the orator and accomplished man of letters, did not forget, in the later years of his life, that men do not and cannot resist false philosophy by the ever ready weapons of ignorance and stupidity, or by a rejection of the ordinary means of education. The widely flung Christian net doubtless caught in its meshes, then as now, simple souls who lived and died untroubled by philosophic doubt; as certainly it enclosed scholars and thinkers ; and for such, educated methods are essential in every age. It is difficult not to admit EVIDENCE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 39 that S. Paul esteemed wisdom when we remember his injunction to the Corinthian Church : " Brethren, be not children in understanding" (R.V. mind); "howbeit in malice be ye children, but in under- "^N. 1 standing (mind) be men (or of full age)." Dr. Light- foot, as also the R.V., reads, "Howbeit in malice be ye babes" which makes the antithesis even stronger. Once more, S. Paul urges on the parents of Ephesus their responsibility to their children : " Ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath : but nurture them in the chastening and admonition of the Lord." 1 This word "nurture," which from our present point of view is the pith of the passage, is taken by four German annotators to mean training; on the other hand, Drs. Alford, Ellicott, Olshausen, and Wordsworth would render it strict discipline. If this does not include the idea of intellectual instruction, it seems to point, at any rate, to a moral education of no light or facile kind, to a handling of character grossly neglected sometimes among ourselves. Apart from all the above facts, we gather from the New Testament records that it was a custom of the Apostles to gather round them disciples, young men, to whom they could impart the funda- 1 Eph. vi. 4. 40 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION mentals of the new faith; whom they could train up, and, in time, send forth to spread the Christian religion, to evangelise the world, so far as it was then known. Possibly we may find the early beginnings of this in S. Paul's work at Ephesus: " When some were hardened and disobedient, speak- ing evil of the Way before the multitude, he (Paul) \ departed from them, and separated the disciples, reasoning daily" (A.V. disputing daily) "in the school of Tyrannus." 1 Again S. Paul mentions 2 among " other my fellow- labourers," one Clement who worked with him. S. Jerome writes : " Clement (of whom the Apostle Paul writing to the Philippians says, ' With Clement and others of my fellow-workers, whose names are written in the book of life '), the fourth bishop of Rome after Peter, if indeed the second was Linus and the third Anacletus, although most of the Latins think that Clement was second after the Apostle. He wrote, on the part of the Church of Rome, an especially valuable Letter to the Church of' the Corinthians." 3 It is quite true that some commentators have doubted whether the Clement of the Epistle to the Philippians is S. Clement of Rome. And again, though Origen asserted that he was, 1 Acts xix. 9. 2 Phil. iv. 3. 3 S. Jerome, Lives of Illustrious Afen, chap. xv. EVIDENCE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 41 it is denied sometimes that Clement of Rome was the author of the Epistle generally called by his name. Eusebius quotes the words of Dionysius of Corinth (written c. 170 A.D.) : " The Epistle written to us through Clement.'" x Again S. Irenaeus writes : "In the time of this Clement, no small dissensions having occurred among the brethren at Corinth, the Church in Rome despatched a most powerful letter to the Corinthians, exhorting them to peace." 2 And, further, S. Clement of Alexandria in his Stromata (bk. vi. chap, viii., and bk. iv. chap, xvii.) attributes the authorship of this Epistle to S. Clement of Rome. It is perhaps impossible to settle whether Clement of Rome wrote the said Epistle, and also whether he were the Clement of the Epistle to the Philippians. But one fact, and, as it happens, the main one of interest in this con- nection, seems not to be disputed, vi/. that there was a Clement of Rome who had been a " disciple " of the Apostles. S. Irenaeus (bk. in. chap. iii. 2) speaks of the founding and organisation of the Church at Rome "by the two most glorious Apostles, Peter and Paul"; and then in the next paragraph he says that " in the third place from the Apostles, Clement was allotted the bishopric." Then follows the 1 Eccles. Hist. iv. 23. z Adv. Hctr. bk. in. chap. iii. 3. 42 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION passage significant to our present purpose the apostolic training of young men "This man, as he had seen the blessed apostles, and had been conversant with them, might be said to have the preaching of the apostles still echoing (in his ears) and their traditions before his eyes. Nor was he alone in this, for there were many still remaining who had received instructions from the apostles." It is surely not straining this passage if we argue that the reference is not to the general body of Christian converts, but rather to its official ministers. Whether the Epistle be S. Clement's or not, there are evidences in it of this special instruction given by the first Apostles to those who were to suc- ceed them ; e.g. chap. xlii. : " They " (the Apostles) "preached in the country and in the towns, they proved by the Spirit the first-fruits of their work in each place, and appointed them to be overseers and deacons among them that should believe " ; and again, chap, xliv., "they appointed the aforesaid overseers and deacons, and ordained that at their death" (i.e. the death of apostolically appointed officials) " their ministry should pass into the hands of other tried men." There are traces of similar training of young men by S. Peter; at the end of his first Epistle he mentions Sylvanus, who apparently wrote out the EVIDENCE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 43 actual script of the Epistle, at S. Peter's dictation ; also he mentions "Mark, my son," of whom S. Jerome (Eccles. Hist. chap, viii.) speaks as " Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter." Then again there is that other early Father, S. Poly carp, who seems to have been one_of these apostolically trained young men. S. Irenaeus (Adv. Hccr. m. iii. 4) writes : " But Polycarp was not only instructed by Apostles, and conversed with many who had seen Christ, but was also, by Apostles in Asia, appointed bishop of the Church in Smyrna, whom I also saw in my early youth, for he tarried (on earth) a very long time, and, when a very old man, gloriously and most nobly suffering martyrdom departed this life, having always taught the things which he had learned from tlie Apostles, and which the Church has handed down, and which alone are true." S. Jerome (Lives of' Illustrious Men, chap, xvii.) tells us " that Polycarp, disciple of the Apostle John, and by him ordained bishop of Smyrna, was chief of all Asia, where he saw and had as teachers some of the apostles, and of those who had seen the Lord." In chap, xviii. Jerome mentions " Papias, the pupil of John," and in chap, xix., "Quadratus, disciple of the Apostles." In this apostolic custom Father Magevny, S.J., 44 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION sees "the far-off dawnings of a system which with varying fortunes was to lead up to the episcopal or cathedral schools of the Middle Ages and the seminaries of modern times. 11 Those who perhaps feel that such a theory builds too heavy a super- structure on a slight foundation, may yet see in this apostolic custom the germ of some of the work carried on later in the catechetical schools of the Christians, which, though the system was not peculiar to them (see Bigg, op. cit., concerning the catechu- mens of Isis, p. 40, and Mithra, p. 50), yet attained to great success in the hands of men like S. Clement of Alexandria and S. Cyril of Jerusalem. CHAPTER II. EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITY IN THE EARLY CENTURIES. IT is curious and interesting to trace a line from Athens round the Mgean Sea, on round the eastern and south-eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, and then to reflect upon the immensity of effort, of human intellectual activity at work there in the centuries immediately preceding the birth of Christ. Such a line would, roughly speaking, connect Athens, Byzantium, and Pergamon ; it would pass Cos and Rhodes, two island homes of learning off the coast of Asia Minor (the latter famed in the last century B.C. and the first A.D. for its school of Rhetoric) ; it would travel on to Tarsus, Antioch, Berytus, and Alexandria. As we contemplate this collection of educational centres in the south-eastern corner of the Mediterranean, the Rome of the future seems isolated in the Italian peninsula. Athens was the first in time as in lasting prestige. And yet in the years of her greatest intellectual supremacy much of the machinery if we may so call it which we regard as an essential part of a University was wanting. For example, there appears then to have been no " University Library " ; as Dr. Sandys remarks, " Apart from Aristotle's Library, we hear of no important collection of books in the Athenian Age." l The confinement of academic buildings was reduced to a minimum, since Newman could write : " No awful arch, no window of many coloured lights marks the seats of learning there or elsewhere; philosophy lives out of doors. No close atmosphere oppresses the brain or inflames the eyelid; no long session stiffens the limbs. Epicurus is reclining in his garden, Zeno looks like a divinity in his porch, the restless Aristotle, on the other side of the city, as if in antagonism to Plato, is walking his pupils off their legs in his Lyceum by the Ilyssus." 2 Since Athens was at the zenith of her glory in pre-Christian times, we may leave her now with one more excerpt from Newman (quoted with approval by Dr. Sandys). "I doubt whether Athens had a library till the reign of Hadrian. It was what the student gazed on, what he heard, what he caught 1 History of Classical Scholarship, p. 86. 2 Historical Sketches, Pickering ed. 1872, vol. i. p. 42. ACTIVITY IN THE EARLY CENTURIES 47 by the magic of sympathy, not what he read, which was the education furnished by Athens." l At the end of the chapter we may return to the Athens of Basil and Gregory; but here it seems better to deal with others of these towns, because though they rose to fame before the birth of Christ, they continued to flourish after that date, and some of them exercised considerable influence on Christian life. Foremost among them all is Alexandria, the city of the Ptolemies, whose fame goes back to the fourth century B.C. When Alexander the Great conquered Egypt, he founded Alexandria on the western side of the Nile Delta. The first of the Ptolemies had been educated at the Court of Philip of Macedon, and was counted among Alexander's personal friends. He accompanied the Conqueror on his Egyptian expedition, and when Alexander died suddenly in 323 B.C., Ptolemy, having caused him to be buried at Alexandria in a golden coffin, turned his attention next to improving his own prospects. He succeeded in making himself master of the newly conquered province, and Alexandria, though bearing even to our own day its founder's name, became the capital city of Egypt and of the dynasty of the Ptolemies. Before the Macedonian attack the inhabitants of the place appear to have 1 Historical Sketches, Pickering ed. 1872, vol. i. p. 40. 48 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION been Egyptians and Greeks. During the first twenty years of the city's existence some colonies of Jews settled in it. It seems to be pretty generally admitted that Greek was the general language of the East. But two conflicting accounts concerning Alexandria may be quoted. Thus Professor Gwatkin writes : " Greek was, indeed, the language of commerce everywhere. No other language was spoken in Greece itself and Macedonia, on the islands and round the coast of Asia inside Taurus. It was only among the Lycaonian mountains (Acts xiv. 11) that S. Paul's Greek was not enough. ... It had tougher rivals in Egypt and Syria. Alexandria, indeed, was mostly Greek, but the common people of Egypt held to their Coptic. Syriac also showed few signs of dis- appearance. In Palestine the Greek element was mostly along the coast and in the Decapolis, though it was also strong in Galilee." l Professor Gwatkin is writing of the Apostolic age. Dr. Sinker is writing of the third and fourth centuries B.C. when he says: "Even before Alexander's time the Jews had settled in large numbers in Egypt, and the building of Alexandria would help to bring them together yet more largely. As in Palestine so a fortiori in Egypt, Hebrew had died out, and here 1 Appendix on Jewish People, the R.-E, and the Greek World in the Apostolic Age, p. 195. ACTIVITY IN THE EARLY CENTURIES 49 Greek, the universal lingua franca, had taken its place." l Putting these two extracts together (extracts which appear in the small volume issued by the Pitt Press in 1893 under the title the Cambridge Companion to the Bible), we seem forced to con- clude that Greek was less triumphantly universal in the first century A.D. than in the third century B.C. Dr. Sandys cites Diodorus Siculus (c. B.C. 40) as a witness to the decline of Hellenistic influence in Alexandria about that time; he writes: "Of Alex- andria at the date 2 of his " (i.e. of D. S.'s) " own visit he tells us, as an eye-witness, that a Roman who had accidentally killed a cat was mercilessly put to death by the populace (i. 14). This incident is of some importance for our present purpose. It proves that the mob of Alexandria was ' no longer Greek as it professed to be, 1 but was 'deeply saturated with Egyptian blood,' 3 thus showing that towards the close of the Alexandrian age, as at the beginning, Greek civilisation in Alexandria was confined to a very limited circle. 11 Dr. Sandys seems to agree with Professor Gwatkin, but not with Dr. Sinker, since he questions the prevalence of Greek civilisation at 1 Ancient Translations of the Bible, p. 40. 2 History of Classical Scholarship, vol. i. p. 117. 8 Prof. Mahaffy, Empire of the Ptolemies. 4 50 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION the beginning of the Alexandrian age. To quote one more writer. Mr. W. S. Lilly in an article in the Nineteenth Century, Sept. 1889, writes of the first century Christians : " There were Jews of Palestine 1 Hebrews ' they are called in the Acts of the Apostles whose language was Aramaic, and there were the * Grecians ' as the same document terms them, Hellenized Jews who spoke, as a rule, with no great correctness the tongue of Hellas, and who came chiefly from Syria, Asia Minor, Egypt, and the parts of Libya about Gyrene." There are obvious discrepancies between these four writers; it has seemed well to cite them accurately, and leave the reader to weigh their relative claims to authority. It is on the supposition that the Jewish colonists of Alexandria had abandoned Hebrew for Greek that some thinkers have surmised that the Greek trans- lation of the Hebrew Scriptures known as the Septuagint was made in the reign of the second Ptolemy for the use of these Alexandrian Hellenized Jews. S. Irenaeus gives a somewhat different account of the genesis of the Septuagint. 1 According to him, Ptolemy, desiring books for his newly-founded library, asked the inhabitants of Jerusalem to prepare for him a Greek version of the Hebrew 1 Against Heresies, bk. in. chap. xxi. ACTIVITY IN THE EARLY CENTURIES 51 Scriptures. In response, they despatched seventy learned elders to Alexandria. Ptolemy, fearing that collusion among them might lead to textual corruption, shut them up, each man by himself, commanding each one to make his own translation. On comparison, the seventy- renderings were found to be verbally identical, " so that even the Gentiles present," adds S. Irenseus, "perceived that the Scriptures had been interpreted by the inspiration of God." It was to the first of the dynasty, to Ptolemy Soter, that Alexandria owed the foundations of her later educational fame. By his liberality and fore- sight the possibility of her future intellectual eminence was secured, for he set out by providing the very raw materials of knowledge. It was he \ who designed and began the Great Library. His son, Ptolemy Philadelphus, finished it, and built the Smaller Library. Demetrius of Phaleron, who acted as adviser to both father and son, stated, about 385 B.C., that the two libraries together contained not less than 200,000 MSS. Besides these institutions, there was the famous Museum, the home of the Muses, built by Ptolemy Phila- delphus. According to Strabo, it consisted of cloisters, a public lecture theatre, and a great dining- hall where its members could meet and feast. It 52 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION is possible that it also possessed zoological and botanical gardens, since the second Ptolemy is known to have been interested in the science of zoology. Like her great forerunner, Athens, Alexandria attracted professors from every part of the civilised world. There is a well-known passage in Cardinal Newman's Historical Sketches descriptive of Alexandria's ancient glory, her pleasant situation, and her stately buildings. 1 The following sentences refer to her catholicity in scholars : " It cannot be thought that the high reputation of these foundations would have been maintained unless Ptolemy had looked beyond Egypt for occupants for his chairs ; and, indeed, he got together the best men wherever he could find them. On these he heaped wealth and privileges ; and so complete was their naturalisation in their adopted country that they lost their usual surnames, drawn from their place of birth, and instead of being called, for instance, Apion of Oasis, or Aristarchus of Samothracia, or Dionysius of Thrace, received each simply the title of 'the Alexandrian.' 1 Thus Clement of Alexandria was a native of Athens, 2 . . . hence proceeded, as it would appear, the great Christian writers and doctors, 1 Vol. i. p. 97. 2 The birthplace of Clement is not definitely established ; though Athens is thought to be more probable than Alexandria: ACTIVITY IN THE EARLY CENTURIES 5H Clement, whom I have just been mentioning, Origen, Anatolius, and Athanasius. S. Gregory Thaumaturgus, in the third century, may be added." The curriculum of Alexandria was wide, including Grammar (in its classical sense, in which, really, literary criticism is a more accurate term), Rhetoric, Poetry, Philosophy and Medicine, Mathematics, Astronomy and Music. Alexandria's intellectual rival, Pergamon, founded about 383 B.C. by Philetaerus, an absconding treasurer of the King of Thrace, rose to honour under that delinquent's great-nephew, Eumenes n. Dr. Sandys observes : " While the school of Alexandria was mainly interested in verbal scholarship, the school of Pergamon found room for a larger variety of scholarly studies. 111 Despite that, the great Galen left Pergamon in the second century A.D. to pursue his medical studies, first at Smyrna and afterwards at Alexandria. Of other cities specially connected with the Christians, Antioch and Tarsus are probably those which occur most readily to our minds. Antioch was the capital of Syria in the third century B.C., and it appears to have attained a considerable degree of culture. S. Jerome says S. Peter was bishop of 1 History of Classical Scholarship, p. 161. 54 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION Antioch before he was bishop of Rome. He mentions among others " a highly-gifted presbyter " of the third century A.D., 1 Malchion, of that Church " who had most successfully taught rhetoric in the same city. 11 It is worth noting, too, as an instance of the recognition of the uses of secular learning, that S. Jerome mentions Diodorus (of the fourth century) who "enjoyed a great reputation while he was still presbyter of Antioch." 2 He further says that Diodorus wrote many works " in the manner of Eusebius the Great of Emesa, whose meaning he has followed, but whose eloquence he could not imitate on account of his ignorance of secular literature." This closing sentence shows clearly that Jerome, at any rate, distinguished piety and learning, and recognised their respective spheres of usefulness. In thinking of Antioch we may recall the fact that Gennadius, adding to Jerome's history, mentions one Theodoras (who may be Theodore of Mopsuestia), " a presbyter of the Church at Antioch, a cautious investigator, and clever of tongue. 113 This remark again proves that the marks of the learned man were known and esteemed by the early Christians. That the art of literature was not utterly neglected by the primitive Christians, Gennadius shows when 1 Eccles. Hist. chap. Ixxi. 2 Chap. xix. 3 Gennadius, chap. xii. ACTIVITY IN THE EARLY CENTURIES 55 he speaks of Isaac, another presbyter of the Church of Antioch, who " lamented the downfall of Antioch in an elegiac poem." Between Pergamon in Mysia and Antioch in Syria lay the Cilician city of Tarsus. Familiar to us all as the birthplace, proudly claimed, of S. Paul, it was less renowned than the other three cities mentioned above as a place of learning. Its schools were good, but none attained to university rank; probably when S. Paul left his native city in order to learn from the great Gamaliel, he was but follow- ing the general custom. Antioch, though not ranking as a university city, could make a claim to a considerable degree of intellectual distinction ; for she possessed a theatre, that essential element in culture; she had a library, the raw material of learning; and Antiochus Asiaticus, the last of his race, dignified his short reign by building for his capital city a Museum, or home of the Muses, in imitation of Alexandria's more famous pile. Though it is slightly anticipating events in later chapters, it seems well to close this one with a description of Athens as it was presented to S. Basil and S. Gregory Nazianzen. They carry us away for the moment from the Church of the first years to that of post-Nicene days. They were two friends and contemporaries in the latter three- 56 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION quarters (roughly speaking) of the fourth century, and the story of their lives throws considerable light on education as it was then in Christian circles. S. Gregory was the son of a man who belonged at first to a small obscure sect called Hypsistarians. Their doctrine blended the idea of a Supreme Deity (without distinction of Persons) with a ritual which, while it abjured all notion of sacrifice, borrowed from the Levitical law details pertaining to the observance of days and the consumption of foods. This man became later on a priest of the Christian Church, and died bishop of Nazianzus. S. Gregory's mother was named Nonna ; she was the daughter of Christian parents. To her the boy owed much of his early training. S. Basil also was indebted to women for a part of his education ; these were his grandmother, mother, and elder sister. The labours of the former on his behalf he recognises in his letters : " The idea of God which I had from my blessed mother, and her mother Macrina, that has ever grown within me" (Letter to Eustathius, 375 A.D.) ; and again : " What clearer evidence can there be of my faith than that I was brought up by my grandmother, blessed woman ! who came from you " (he is writing to the Church of Neocaesarea), " I mean the celebrated Macrina, who taught me the words of the most blessed ACTIVITY IN THE EARLY CENTURIES f>7 Gregory ; which as far as memory had preserved down to her day, she cherished herself, while she fashioned and formed me, while yet a child, upon the doctrines of piety." The actual year of Gregory's birth is uncertain, lying probably between 325 and 330 A.D. He had an elder sister, and a brother who followed the profession of medicine probably younger than him- self. The boys went to school in the Cappadocian Caesarea; their tutor was the man whom Gregory afterwards, in his Carmen de Vita sua, apostrophised as follows : " Remember now the Gregory whom erst Thou trainedst in the way of virtuous life, Carterius, master of the life of grace." Later on, the two brothers were removed to the other Caesarea in Palestine, the metropolitical see, well known as that of Eusebius the historian; S. Basil became its diocesan later on. The foundation of the school and library of Caesarea is attributed to Pamphilus, the friend and teacher of Eusebius. Jerome says that Pamphilus transcribed with his own hand the greater part of Origen's works for this library. 1 Origen, probably the most learned man of his time, taught in the school. Of its 1 Jerome, chap. Ixxv. 58 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION curriculum Jerome gives us a glimpse in chap. Ixv. of his Ecclesiastical History. He tells us that Theodorus, afterward called Gregory of Neocaesarea (210 (or 15)-270 A.D.), probably " the most blessed Gregory " of S. Basil's letter, " went to Caesarea in Palestine to study Greek and Latin literature." Jerome adds that Origen persuaded the young man " to study philosophy, in the teaching of which he " (Origen) "gradually introduced the matter of faith in Christ." Jerome writes in a later chapter that a contemporary of S. Gregory, Euzoius, bishop of Caesarea (after Basil), " with great pains attempted to restore the library collected by Origen and Pamphilus, which had already suffered injury." 1 But in the youth of Gregory, Caesarea's school was apparently flourishing. He went for a short time to Alexandria, and hence took ship to the older rniversity, Athens. In danger of shipwreck, he vowed to be baptized if his life were spared. On his arrival at Athens he found S. Basil, whom he had met first in the school of Carterius. It is not known when S. Gregory was baptized. Cardinal Newman (Historical Sketches, vol. iii. p. 53) observes that he and Basil sought that rite together, after their five years of successful student life at Athens. The material point to the historian of education is 1 Chap, cxiii. ACTIVITY IN THE EARLY CENTURIES 59 their way of life at that University. In the poem cited before, Gregory writes : " A pair were we not all unknown in Greece ; All things we shared in common, and one soul Linked us together though in body twain. One thing there was which joined us most of all, The love of God and of the highest good." It is in the Panegyric on *S'. Basil, pronounced perhaps on the third anniversary of that saint's death, that we find S. Gregory's views of education in general and of Athens in particular. His general view of education is shown by the following quota- tion from his Oration : ( 11) "I take it as admitted by men of sense, that the first of our advantages is education ; and not only this our more noble form of it, which disregards rhetorical ornaments and glory and holds to salvation and beauty in the objects of our con- templation, but even that external culture which many Christians ill-judgingly abhor as treacherous and dangerous, and keeping us afar from God. For as we ought not to neglect the heavens, and earth, and air, and all such things because some have wrongly seized upon them, and honour God's works instead of God ; but to reap what advantages we can from them for our life and enjoyment, while we avoid their dangers ; not raising creation, as 60 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION foolish men do, in revolt against the Creator, but from the works of Nature apprehending the Worker, and, as the divine Apostle says, bringing into captivity every thought to Christ; and again as we know that neither fire, nor food, nor iron, nor any other of the elements is of itself most useful or most harmful except according to the will of those who use it ; and as we have compounded healthful drugs from certain of the reptiles, so from secular literature we have received principles of inquiry and speculation, while we have rejected their idolatry, terror, and pit of destruction. Nay, even these have aided us in our religion, by our percep- tion of the contrast between what is worse and what is better, and by gaining strength for our doctrine from the weakness of theirs. We must not, then, dishonour education because some men are pleased to do so, but rather suppose such men to be boorish and uneducated, desiring all men to be as they themselves are, in order to hide themselves in the general, and escape the detection of their want of culture. But come now and, after this sketch of our subject and these admissions, let us contemplate the life of Basil." It has seemed worth while to quote this section in its entirety. It is quite true that it contains the admissions that " many Christians ill-judgingly ACTIVITY IN THE EARLY CENTURIES 61 abuor" "external culture," and that some men (by whih we understand some Christian men) "dis- hono'ir education"; but, on the other hand, the whole spirit of S. Gregory is agreeable to that wider outlook, that serene sanity, which has ever distinguished the nobler leaders of the Catholic Church, those, that is, who have not been the least Christian, but, on the contrary, have been the most so. It is interesting to reflect that the Oration was pronounced after Gregory's departure from Constantinople in 381 ; if Compayre were right in saying that "after the fourth century profound night wraps humanity," one can only conclude that the passage from light to darkness was start - lingly rapid. In describing Basil's boyhood's upbringing by his father, "acknowledged in those days by Pontus as its common teacher of virtue," Gregory again gives us a glimpse of his general theory : ( 12) " He was trained in general education, and practised in the worship of God, and, to speak concisely, led on by " elementary instruction to his future perfection. For \those who are successful in life or in letters only, J while deficient in the other, seem to me to differ in i f ' nothing from one-eyed men, whose loss is great but their deformity greater, both in their own eyes and in those of others. While those who attain eminen 62 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION in both alike, and are ambidextrous, both possess perfection and pass their life with the blessed iess of heaven." Again, we get a scrap of educational theory where, in 21, he is describing their life at Athens : " Our most cherished studies were not the most pleasant, but the most excellent, this being one means of forming young minds in a virtuous or vicious mould." Pedagogic theorists differ, and apparently always have differed, on the theory of " no tasks " ; some holding that learning should be made easy ; others, with whom is S. Gregory apparently, that the end not the means settles the question, not pleasure but excellence determines our choice; in which case obstacles must inevitably bar our way, and teach us the difficult art of climbing. If anyone doubt still whether Gregory valued learning, i.e. learning as common men understand it, secular learning, or to take the gentler name of fair association, the humanities, then let them listen to the saint's account of the city of Caesarea : (12) " Caesarea ... I mean this illustrious city of ours, for it was the guide and mistress of my studies, the metropolis of letters no less than the cities she excels and reigns over; and if anyone were to deprive her of her literary power, he would rob her of her fairest and special distinction."" Could ACTIVITY IN THE EARLY CENTURIES 63 any humanist wish him to say more ? But he is not content ; he adds : " Other cities take pride in other ornaments, of ancient or of recent date, that they may seem something to be described or to be seen. Letters form our distinction here, and are our badge, as if upon the field of arms or on the stage." Lest anyone should think that Gregory was carried away by local patriotism, " town-pride, 11 let us add his description of " Byzantium, the imperial city of the East . . . distinguished by the eminence of its rhetorical and philosophical teaching." So much for his general outlook ; let us tuni to his account of Athens, the city of which with loving recollection he writes : ( 14) " Athens, which has been to me, if to anyone, a city truly of gold, and the patroness of all that is good. For it brought me to know Basil more perfectly, though he had not been unknown to me before, and in my pursuit of letters I attained to happiness." He admits that Athens was a dangerous environment for the weaker brethren : " Hurtful as Athens was to others in spiritual things, and this is of slight consequence to the pious, for the city is richer in those evil riches idols than the rest of Greece, and it is hard to avoid being carried along with their devotees and adherents; yet we, our minds being closed up and fortified against this, suffered 64 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION no injury. On the contrary, strange as it may seem, we were thus the more confirmed in the faith from our perception of their trickery and unreality, which led us to despise these divinities in the very home of their worship." Here surely Gregory indicates, to those who had sense enough to appreciate his suggestion, the wisdom of breadth ; the courage of daring to compare one's own ideal with another, with one even hostile and alien to it ; the kind of courageous holding of truth which Mill advocated in his Liberty ; the " trying " of all things which S. Paul recommended and commended. The main study in the University of Athens when these two distinguished men became her alumni seems to have been oratory : ( 15) " Most of the young men at Athens," writes Gregory, "in their folly are mad after rhetorical skill." He goes on to describe the initiation of the "freshman," how he is introduced to "those who are eminent in debating power, and purveyors of arguments"; how then he is subjected to a course of " raillery," " of a more insolent or argumentative kind, according to the boorishness or refinement of the railer." This part of the " salting " process, as it was called in the German Universities of the sixteenth century, draws the following comment from Gregory : ACTIVITY IN THE EARLY CENTURIES 65 "The performance which seems very fearful and brutal to those who do not know it, is to those who have experienced it very pleasant and humane, for its threats are feigned rather than real. 1 ' It is a far cry from to-day to that day of the fourth century when S. Gregory, to a mixed audience no doubt, recalled his student days. But nevertheless the reader is on familiar ground; for who has not heard the Oxford or Cambridge graduate justify, with gentle condescension, to that common herd so uninitiated in such ways, the immemorial practices of his Alma Mater ? The final stage of this curious process was a forced bath, after which the Athenian freshman was received by the rest "as an equal, and one of themselves." The two future saints were evidently numbered among the " reading men " : ( 12) " Two ways were known to us, the first of greater value, the second of smaller consequence; the one leading to our sacred building and to our teachers there, the other to secular instructors." No jealousy ever marred their friendship : ( 20) " Envy we knew not, and emulation was of service to us. We struggled, not each to gain the first place for himself, but to yield to the other; for we made each other's reputation to be our own." 5 66 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION The social life of the University of Athens must have been distracting enough ; Gregory speaks of the other students as attending ( 21) "feasts, theatres, meetings, banquets, 1 " He and Basil lived differently : ( 20) " impelled " as he says they were, "by equal hopes, that of letters"; yet there was another aim, and in attempting its achievement they must have been marked off from the gay and dissipated throng of students not less than by their love of learning ; and that aim Gregory describes in these words : ( 21) " We had but one great business and name, to be and to be called Christians, of which we thought more than Gyges of the turning of his ring." Sidelights upon the learning of Athens are thrown by Gregory's references to Basil's erudition. It is true that Gregory passed a much longer time there than his friend, remaining probably some twelve years or more ; nevertheless Basil owed much to the city. His skill in languages was not acquired there, as Gregory tells us: ( 15) "He was versed in many languages before his arrival." Evidently he had much still to learn, as the end of this sentence runs: ( 23) "It was a great thing for either of us to outstrip the other in the attainment of some object of our study." They succeeded " we became famous, not only among our own ACTIVITY IN THE EARLY CENTURIES 67 teachers and comrades, but even throughout Greece, and especially in the eyes of its most distinguished men."" Some may deduce from the well-known fact that the two young men relinquished University life to take up purely Christian work, a proof that the Christians did not esteem learning highly. A sufficient answer may be found in the fact that S. Gregory, late in life, delivered this oration, so alive with love of learning. But in another passage Gregory, describing Basil's rare attainments, gives us information concerning the curriculum of Athens: ( 23) "Who, owing to his character, was less in need of education ? Yet who, even with his character, was so imbued with learning ? What branch of learning did he not traverse ; and that with unexampled success, passing through all as no one else passed through any one of them ; and attaining such eminence in each, as if it had been his sole study ? The two great sources of power in the arts and sciences, ability and application, were in him equally combined. For, because of the pains he took, he had but little need of natural quickness, and his natural quickness made it unnecessary for him to take pains ; and such was the co-operation and unity of both that it was hard to see for which of the two he was more remarkable. Who had such 68 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION power in Rhetoric, which breathes with the might of fire, different as his disposition was from that of rhetoricians? Who in Grammar, which perfects our tongues in Greek, and compiles history, and presides over metres, and legislates for poems? Who in Philosophy, that really lofty and high- reaching science, whether practical and speculative, or in that part of it whose oppositions and struggles are concerned with logical demonstrations ; which is called Dialectic, and in which it was more difficult to elude the verbal toils, if need required, than to escape from the Labyrinths? Of Astronomy, Geometry, and numerical proportion he had such a grasp, that he could not be baffled by those who are clever in such sciences; excessive application to them he despised as useless to those whose desire is godliness ; so that it is possible to admire what he chose more than what he neglected, or what he neglected more than what he chose. Medicine, the result of philosophy and laboriousness, was rendered necessary for him by his physical delicacy and his care of the sick. From these beginnings he attained to a mastery of the art, not only in its empirical and practical branches, but also in its theory and principles.'" In the next section S. Gregory seems to sum up his friend^s attainments in a single sentence, " His ACTIVITY IN THE EARLY CENTURIES 69 galleon was laden with all the learning attainable by the nature of man." One more quotation in praise of S. Basil's learning must suffice: ( 13) "An orator among orators, even before the chair of the rhetoricians 1 ' (i.e. before he had studied rhetoric); "a philosopher among philosophers, even before the doctrines of philosophers; highest of all, a priest among Christians, even before the priesthood." One sentence in the same section is of special interest as showing that a Christian could under- stand the essential connection between different parts of human philosophy: "Eloquence was his by- work from which he culled enough to make it an assistance to him in Christian philosophy, since power of this kind is needed to set forth the objects of our contemplation." S. Basil, some years after he left Athens, retired to a place close to Neocaesarea, where he was born, and there lived with a few companions in a condition so like monastic solitude that the Eastern Church regarded him as the founder of monasticism, in Pontus. In a letter to Gregory he gives insight into his " rule." His utter self - dissatisfaction escapes in the pathetic confession to his friend : " Though I have left the city's haunts, as the source of innumerable ills, yet I have not yet learned to 70 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION leave myself ... so I have got no great good from this retirement. 1 ' Those who, with that folly which springs from party spirit, expect to find nothing in a monk's mind but stringent asceticism, may be surprised by the quick humanity of the following description of our common lot. The trials of the common man in the fourth century bear a singular resemblance to those of the same person in the twentieth : " He who is not yet yoked in the bonds of matrimony is harassed by frenzied cravings, and rebellious impulses, and hopeless attachments; he who has found his mate is encompassed with his own tumult of cares ; if he is childless there is desire of children ; has he children, anxiety about their education ; attention to his wife, care of his house, oversight of his servants, misfortunes in trade, quarrels with his neighbours, lawsuits, the risks of the merchant, the toil of the farmer. Each day as it comes darkens the soul in its own way, and night after night takes up the day's anxieties and cheats the mind with corresponding illusions." Writing once of instruction, Matthew Arnold declared that " its prime direct aim is to enable a man to know himself and the world" But education . ^" is a more comprehensive matter than instruction, and is concerned primarily as well as finally with ACTIVITY IN THE EARLY CENTURIES 71 the regulation of conduct, that conduct which, as Matthew Arnold also taught us, " is three-fourths of life." And so in this descriptive passage concerning man's ordinary life on earth, S. Basil encloses in a nutshell the natural conditions which it is education's task to alter and ennoble. S. Basil's method is not likely to commend itself to the populace ; but it was an educational method of a primitive Christian, and it deserves a brief notice here, because it is interesting to notice how a similar up-bringing affected two men differently ; S. Gregory exhibiting so much more regard for learning than his friend, which might puzzle M. Compayre" if he thought of his own observation : "If the early Fathers of the Church showed some occasional sympathy for profane literature, it was owing to the fact that in their unbaptized youth they frequented pagan schools." In their "unbaptized youth" both S. Basil and S. Gregory frequented Athens. (Pagan seems a curious adjective to apply to that city, and yet it is undoubtedly of Greece and Rome that M. Compayr<5 is speaking.) They both imbibed its learning ; but temperament intervened, and though Basil's culture was wide and profound, it is Gregory who speaks and writes most in favour of learning. Basil's 72 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION "rule" included "prayer while it is yet night"; manual labour; theological study, mainly of the Bible, for he writes, " the study of inspired Scripture is the chief way of finding our duty," and works of mercy among the poor. We may conclude that, like other men, the Fathers differed in temperament and taste; and did not owe their regard for learning wholly to the pagan schools they attended in their youth. CHAPTER III. SCHOOLS UNDER THE ROMAN EMPIRE. SIXCE Christianity developed within the limits of the Roman Empire, no inquiry into primitive Christian education can dispense with all knowledge of Roman schools and education. In the days pre- ceding the Empire, the Romans had, it appears, devised a system of education of which the means or instruments were not, in the main, literary. It is a commonplace to say that the Greeks were idealists and the Romans practical men. While Socrates, Plato, and their disciples were considering the beautiful and the true, or were busying them- selves with dialectical subtleties concerning Justice, Temperance, and the like, the Romans were produc- ing strong bodied men, ready for the emergencies of daily active life ; men trained by practice in all the arts of war, and stiffened for the battle of life by an extreme respect for Law. 73 74 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION In comparing Roman and Christian education, it is not without relevance to reflect on the different attitude of each to human life. The sacred import of the least human soul is, and ever has been, a fundamental doctrine of Christianity, except perhaps where it has suffered injury from the triste theory of " election." How divergent from the Christian view was that which gave absolute power over the life of his new- born child to the Roman father. Superfluous, on account of the family's inadequate resources, or because it was constitutionally debile, defective, or deformed, the infant Roman was liable to be discarded at his father's fiat, and to be exposed to death at the cross-roads, " unless a slave merchant picks it up in order to sell it." " In the absence of the father," writes M. Victor Duruy, "judgment is suspended till his return, the newly-born is only provisionally nourished. Sometimes the father has given his consent before quitting home. * Bring up that which shall be born in my absence. 1 A sad formula ! what shall be born ! Just as one would talk of a flock of sheep." //^> Before the third century B.C. the beginnings of a Roman child's education were an affair of the home. As he grew up he was called upon to practise bodily exercises in the Campus Martius, SCHOOLS UNDER ROMAN EMPIRE 75 where he learned to box and wrestle, to throw the discus, to hurl a javelin, to ride, to drive a chariot, and so forth. It was indeed a programme calculated to evoke the enthusiastic applause of a Rabelais. Moreover, Roman youths, as they approached man- hood, were instructed in the great national legal code, the Law of the Twelve Tables. Strong in body, practical in outlook, reverencing the gods, amenable to and filled with respect for inviolate, almost inviolable Law, the Roman, before his judg- ment was shaken by speculation and his virtue undermined by luxury, was, as we all know, an invincibly victorious being. "For a long time, 11 writes Eschenberg (Manual of Classical Literature), " there were - no public schools, but the youth received the necessary instruction from private or family teachers (pttdagogi). There were, however, those who in their houses gave instruction to a number of youths together. The corporeal exercises, especially in the early times, were viewed by the Romans as a more essential object in education than the study of literature and science. They did not neglect, however, an early cultivation of the manners and of noble feelings, especially patriotism, love of liberty, and heroic courage. 11 Pliny in one of his letters remarks : " Among our ancestors, instruction did not appeal only to the 76 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION ears, but also to the eyes. The youngest children, watching their elders, learned that which very soon they ought to do themselves, that which they would one day teach their children to do."" At the close of the third century B.C. the influence of Greek learning made itself felt in Rome. Private schools were established, and teachers of Rhetoric came to settle there. M. Boissier (La Fin du Paganisme, vol. i. bk. ii. chap, i.) remarks that the older Roman schools continued to exist; but they fell to the rank of elementary schools. He quotes from Apuleius proof that gradually three grades of instruction appeared among the Romans. The child first learned of the litterator, who taught him little more than the bare arts of reading and writing ; next he went to the grammarian, and lastly to the rhetorician. Some features, and these not the best, of Athenian life appeared in Rome. Among the changes con- sequent on the introduction of Greek ways of thought, we note in the sphere of education the relaxation of parental authority, and the abandonment of their natural functions by the Roman matrons, who now began to hand over their children's upbringing to hired servants or slaves. It should not, however, be assumed too easily that the nurse was an unworthy representative of the mother, as the following descrip- SCHOOLS UNDER ROMAN EMPIRE 77 tion by M. Victor Duruy suggests : " In the families of the great, the newly-born child was given in charge to a nurse, who from that day became an important person in the family, and preserved to her last hour the affection of him whom she had brought up. Pliny, Dasumius, bequeathed to their nurse a small house, a field, some slaves, with the flock of sheep, the necessary farm implements, and a small capital to work with. Domitian gives to his a villa on the Via Latina. On her part the nurse, the servant in a pre-eminent degree, is faithful and devoted to death. When everything is falling to pieces, when the friends who have been watching flee from fear, she is there by the blood-stained corpse ; she saves from the Gemoniae the remains of Nero, or the last Flavian, and conveys them secretly to the ancestral tomb." 1 The great revolution wrought by the Greeks in the system of Roman education was the substitution of a literary for a practical training. Dr. Sandys connects this change with the visit paid to Rome by Crates of Mallos, head of the Pergamene School under Eumenes n., in 168 B.C. 2 Dr. Sandys describes the change in a short paragraph : " Our authority for the visit of Crates and its consequences is the 1 History of Rome and the Roman People. ~ History of Classical Scholarship, vol. i. pp. 170, 171. 78 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION treatise of Suetonius, DC Grammatlcls. He begins that treatise with the remark that in earlier times, while Rome was still uncivilised and engrossed in war, and was not yet in the enjoyment of any large amount of leisure for the liberal arts, the study of literature (grammatica) was not in use, much less was it in esteem. The beginnings of that study, he adds, were unimportant, as its earliest teachers, who were poets and half-Greeks (namely, Livius, Andronicus, and Ennius, who were stated to have taught in both languages at Rome and elsewhere), limited themselves to translating Greek authors or reciting anything which they happened to have composed in Latin. After adding that the two books on letters and syllables and also on metres ascribed to Ennius were justly attributed to a later writer of the same name, he states that, in his opinion, the first to introduce the study of literature into Rome was Crates of Mallos, who, during his accidental detention in Rome, gave many recita- tions and lectures, which aroused an interest in the subject/ 11 The clear proof that education in republican Rome was not at first literary, lies in the fact that the Romans were unacquainted with Greek literature till the middle of the second century B.C. 1 History of Classical Scholarship, vol. i. pp. 170, 171. SCHOOLS UNDER ROMAN EMPIRE 79 and, roughly speaking, they had none of their own 1 till a much later period. Yet the Romans seem to have been apt pupils in literature. When we reflect that Marcus Terentius Varro (116-27 B.C.) wrote on grammar, logic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, music, medicine, and architecture, we realise how quickly and radically the position was changed since the primitive days when the education of children, after it left the domestic stage, was confined to the practice of physical exercises and the study of Roman law. And again, as students of the history of education, we may find interest in the fact, noted by Dr. Sandys, that the first seven of these subjects on which Varro 1 It may not be out of place to append a list (with dates) of the great names in Latin literature : POETS. Terence Lucretius Catullus Virgil . Horace Tibullus Ovid . Lucan . Martial Juvenal (Mr. Watson, the translator of Quintilian's Institutes, quotes Dod- well as supposing Quintilian to have been alive in 118 A.D.) I. PROSE WRITERS. B.C. B.C. 185-159 Caesar 100-44 97-53 Cicero 106-43 84-54 Sallust . 86-34 70-9 Livy 59-l8 A.D. 65-8 Seneca . 54-39 A.D. 54-19 A.D. 54-18 A.D. Quintilian 35-95 (?) A.D. Elder Pliny 23-79 39-65 Younger Pliny . 61-105 . 40-104 Plutarch . 45 (5o)-i25 c. 55 (6o)-i40 80 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION wrote (save that astronomy should give place to philosophy) are S. Augustine's " seven liberal arts"; while, as they stand, they are the famous triv'mm and quadrivium of the mediaeval educational system. The first Roman library was founded in 39 B.C. by Asinius Pollio. Father Magevny, S.J., computes that as early as B.C. 60 there were at least thirty, distinct schools in Rome. In the first Christian century % during the reign of Vespasian, Imperial Schools (Auditoria) were established not only in Rome, but in some of the large provincial towns of the Empire. Dr. Bigg in The Church's Task under the Empire gives a somewhat different account. He writes (p. 4) : "In the time of Horace, and throughout the first century, they were what we should call private schools. From the second century onward they assume a public character; and teachers were appointed and paid by the State or the municipality. Grammar schools were to be found everywhere, and every township of any importance possessed also teachers of rhetoric. 1 ' And again he writes (p. 20) : " From the second century the private school tends to disappear, and the masters are selected and paid by the town council, in some cases by the Emperor himself. 11 SCHOOLS UNDER ROMAN EMPIRE 81 As the main motive of this book is suggestion rather than dogmatic statement, it may be admissible to quote the following extracts from M. Victor Duruy : " Meanwhile the child is growing up. Good masters were given him, and the endeavour was made not to set before him too many bad examples. It is a Roman Satirist, Juvenal, who wrote these words, the Supreme rule in Education, Maxima debetur puero reverentia. . . . We think that there is found in an infantas cradle a soft beneficial influence to bring peace into a troubled household, or to drive away bad practices, and we like to believe that this thought is of recent date ; it is as old as this bitter censor, and existed in the minds of many of his contemporaries : ' If thou art concocting any guilty project, the sight of thy son will stop thee. 1 ... At about fifteen or sixteen, puberty is reached ; the boy lays aside the praetexta " (the purple bordered toga worn by free-born children), "suspends his gold or leathern bulla"" (the boyish neck ornament, usually golden and heartshaped) " to the neck of the Lares, bids farewell to his boyish amusements, his games with nuts, the top, the swing, the hoop, the stick which had served him for ten years as a horse. The assumption of the togo virilis takes place yearly on the 16th before the Calends of March (17 February). . . . Yesterday, it was boy- 6 82 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION hood and games; to-morrow it will be active and responsible life. In fact, to-morrow the child, now become a man, is to commence his new existence ; if poor, he will earn a trade ; if rich, he will be bound to a jurisconsult, or he will be sent to a provincial governor to go through an apprenticeship to arms or civil service." * A clear light is thrown upon the state of education in Rome during the first century A.D. by Quintilian. Those who discount the advice of a theorist cannot refuse to hear a man who in his preface declares that he had " secured rest from my labours, which for twenty years I had devoted to the instruction of youth." We may recall the words of Erasmus in his treatise de Ratione Studii : " It seems a mere impertinence in me to handle afresh a subject which has been made so conspicuously his own by the great Quintilian." The famous Dutch scholar could have no inkling of the torrent of pedagogic theory soon to be swept over the world the world which is still so listless in these high matters. Quintilian's efforts during the said twenty years had been directed towards a limited end, the production of orators. But his treatise deals with a wider problem. Point- ing out that previous writers, both Greek and Latin, 1 History of Rome and of the Roman People, pp. 241 et seq. SCHOOLS UNDER ROMAN EMPIRE 83 had published admirable works on the art of oratory, and refusing his friend's invitation to undertake the " task, if not of inventing new precepts, at least of pronouncing judgment concerning the old, 11 on the ground that he did not "wish to tread merely in other men's footsteps," Quintilian begins with the early training of a child. Preface, 5 : " For myself, as I consider that nothing is unnecessary to the art of oratory, without which it must be confessed that an orator cannot be formed, and that there is no possibility of arriving at the summit of anything without previous initiatory efforts, I shall not shrink from stooping to those lesser matters, the neglect of which leaves no place for greater ; and shall proceed to regulate the studies of the orator from his infancy, just as if he were entrusted to me to be brought up." The treatise is dedicated in this Preface to Marcellus Victorius; not only because his "extra- ordinary love of letters" made it suitable, but because Quintilian, like Montaigne writing to the Comtesse de Gurson, and John Locke to Edward Clarke, had a definite practical purpose in his offer- ing : " My treatise seemed likely to be of use for the instruction of your son, ... a treatise which I have resolved to conduct from the very cradle as it were of oratory, through all the studies which can at all assist the future speaker to the summit of that art." The many-sidedness of the orator appears in 18 : " Let the orator therefore be- such a man as may be called truly wise, not blameless in morals only (for that in my opinion, though some disagree with me, is not enough), but accomplished also in science, and in every qualification for speaking; a character such as, perhaps, no man ever was. 11 It is evident that all the ordinary elements of education must enter into a system which is to produce such a man : and it is to these, not to the special means of achieving oratorical skill, that the historian of education looks for light upon the every- day education of Rome. It is extremely interesting to note that Quintilian lays stress on the importance of beginning at once with a child, of laying the foundations early in life : "Let a father, then, as soon as his son is bom, conceive, first of all, the best possible hopes of him, for he will thus grow the more solicitous about his improvement, from the very beginning. 11 Quintilian returns to this question later on, bk. i. chap. i. para. 16: "Those, however, advise better who, like Chrysippus, think that no part of a child^ life should be exempt from tuition : for Chrysippus, though he has allowed three years to the nurses, yet SCHOOLS UNDER ROMAN EMPIRE 85 is of opinion that the minds of children may be imbued with excellent instruction even by them. . . . Let us not then lose even the earliest period of life, and so much the less as the elements of learning depend on the memory alone, which not only exists in children, but is at that time of life even most tenacious." All the great educators insist on the all-import- ance of the start. " The beginning," said Plato, " is the chiefest part, especially in a young and tender thing." " The foundation must be laid in the first years of life," wrote Peter Paul Vergerius; "the disposition moulded whilst it is susceptible, and the mind trained while it is retentive." Erasmus, writing 7 O to William, duke of Cleves, warns him in the follow- ing words: "Therefore bestow especial pains upon his tenderest years ; as Virgil teaches, ' Handle the wax while it is soft, mould the clay while it is moist, dye the fleece before it gathers stains. 1 It is no light task to educate our children aright." " Give me a child till he is seven, and I care not who has him after," is a remark attributed to Ignatius Loyola; and the Abbe Galiani utters a still more startling rendering of the underlying idea when he tells Madame d'Epinay that a child has taken his ply for good or evil by the time he is two. The list of similar opinions might be lengthened 86 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION enormously, but the above are sufficiently repre- sentative. In the pages of Quintilian we are introduced to the four classes of people who surrounded Roman youth: the nurse, the parents, the young slaves, and the pccdagogus. From this we see that Roman matrons had by his day abandoned pretty generally the actual training up of their youthful children : we gather from what he says that the nurse's influence was incessant : 1 " Before all things, let the talk of the child's nurses not be ungrammatical. Chrysippus wished them, if possible, to be women of some knowledge; at any rate he would have the best, as far as circumstances would allow choice. To their morals, doubtless, attention is first to be paid; but let them also speak with propriety. It is they that the child will hear first: it is their words that he will try to form by imitation. We are by nature most tenacious of what we have imbibed in our infant years; as the flavour, with which you scent vessels, when new, remains in them ; nor can the colours of wool, for which its plain whiteness has been exchanged, be effaced." Quintilian requires a similar excellence of speech from the young slaves (Puerls is the word used, 1 Book I. chap. i. para. 4. SCHOOLS UNDER ROMAN EMPIRE 87 but it is understood to signify slave-boys) among whom he will grow up. The modern exaltation of " Pedagogy " must not lead anyone to uplift the old Roman pedagogue unduly. He was a slave, of superior standing, who sometimes won his freedom, and often had received education. Palaemon, who was in all probability Quintilian's preceptor, was in the beginning of things a poedagogus, a slave, who first acquired the begin- ning of learning as he took his master's son to and from school. There is a well-known passage in S. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians where he writes : J " Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ." This passage has been rendered by Drs. Ellicott, Jowett, and Wordsworth, "the law became the slave who led us to school." If 54 A.D. be the date of the Epistle to the Galatians, it is clear that this habit of employing pcedagogi to accompany boys to school was well established before Quintilian wrote his Institutes. Before passing on to his account of contemporary schools, it seems worth while to notice his advice on home education, that which occurs before the child, in his own quaint phrase, "leaves the lap" (exire de gremio). He is aware, at the outset, of 1 Gal. iii. 24. 88 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION the dignity of real knowledge, of the gap between it and the meretricious assumption of it by the genuinely ignorant : 1 "Of pccdagogi this further may be said, that they should either be men of acknowledged learning, which I should wish to be the first object, or that they should be conscious of their want of learning ; for none are more pernicious than those who, having gone some little beyond the first elements, clothe themselves in a mistaken persuasion of their own knowledge. 1 " Then Quintilian urges that a boy, a Roman boy, of course, should begin Greek before Latin : 2 " Because he will acquire Latin, which is in general use, even though we tried to prevent him ; and because, at the same time, he ought first to be instructed in Greek learning, from which ours is derived. 1 ' It is this kind of plan which, many centuries later, was followed by Montaigne's father when he engaged as a tutor for his infant boy a German who knew no French, but who conversed fluently in Latin. Consequently, Montaigne could speak Latin before the tongue of his own Perigord. Later on Quintilian 3 urges that a child's instruc- tion is to be an amusement to him. Yet he does not push his theory nearly so far as some modern 1 I. i. 8. 2 i. i. n. 3 I. i. 20. SCHOOLS UNDER ROMAN EMPIRE 89 educators, for it is perfectly evident that the robust Roman expects and requires effort on the pupil's part. It is interesting to notice the stress which he lays on the mechanical art of writing. Mneas Sylvius, in the later years of the Italian Renaissance, urged the importance of this upon a prince whom he was advising, observing that it was no credit to Alfonso the Magnanimous that his signature resembled a worm crawling over the paper; but it is not a matter which commonly evokes the enthusiasm of teacher or taught. Quintilian is emphatic : x " The accomplishment of writing well and expeditiously, which is commonly disregarded by people of quality, is by no means an indifferent matter; for as writing itself is the principal thing in our studies, and that by which alone sure proficiency, resting on the deepest roots, is secured, a too slow way of writing retards thought, a rude and confused hand cannot be read; and hence follows another task, that of reading off what is to be copied from the writing. At all times, there- fore, and in all places, and especially in writing private and familiar letters, it will be a source of pleasure to us not to have neglected even this acquirement." Francis Bacon, one day long enough off from 1 i. i. 28, 29. 90 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION Quintilian's, well put the matter somewhat differ- ently : 1 " Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man."" Once more Quintilian gives a piece of advice concerning those little people still in the care of the nursery. Like Erasmus, he does not contemn the wise saw, the moral apothegm : 2 " Since, too, we are still attending to small matters, I would express the wish that even the lines which are set him for his imitation in writing should not contain useless sentences, but such as convey some moral instruction. The remembrance of such admonitions will attend him to old age, and will be of use even for the formation of his character. 11 Similarly, Erasmus did not despise the copy-book maxim, or even the inscription on a cup : 3 " These are all devices for adding to our stores, which, trivial as they may seem individually, have a distinct cumula- tive value." The schools of the Empire appear to have been, during the first century A.D., what we should call " private- venture " schools. These are known as grammar-schools, and Roman boys entered them about the age of seven, and remained in them, as a rule, for seven years. Above these were the schools of Rhetoric and famous schools of learning ; 1 Essay of Studies. " I. i. 35, 36. 3 de Ratione Stiidii. SCHOOLS UNDER ROMAN EMPIRE 91 but these latter rather resembled a modern Univer- sity College than a boys 1 school. The curriculum in the grammar schools differed in different places : in the great towns the "beggarly elements," "the three R's," were taught, but the main business of the school was Grammar, interpreting that word in the ancient fashion, which included in its meaning the study of the structure and right use of language, together with knowledge and understanding of the great critics, and a critical appreciation of literary style. M. Boissier (La Fin du Paganisme, vol. i. bk. i. chap, i.) explains the vast contents of "grammar"" as understood in Rome. It naturally dealt with words and sounds ; and the contents of literature, verse and prose, were added soon. But that by no means exhausted the subject: "The study of all existing literature did not seem enough to occupy the grammarians 1 time : they added on all those accessory sciences which are indispensable if pupils are to understand what they read. Is it possible that they should scan verse and appreciate its rhythm if they are ignorant of music? The grammarian must teach them, then. The poets are full of passages describing the sky and the rising and setting of the planets, how are they to understand these unless the grammarian teaches them astronomy? Finally, since there are whole 92 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION poems, notably those of Empedocles and Lucretius, which are devoted to the exposition and discussion of philosophic systems, it is well that the pupils should comprehend philosophy ; and philosophy cannot be grasped without some notion of the exact sciences, above all of geology and mathe- matics. Well, then, grammar embraces the whole circle of human knowledge." In country places where few well-to-do people sent their children to school, probably the matter of teaching was confined mainly to the elementary subjects reading, writing, and arithmetic. At the beginning of his treatise, Quintilian is undoubtedly referring to the grammar schools, because he writes : l " Let us suppose that the child now gradually increases in size, leaves the lap, and applies himself to learning in earnest."" We could hardly suppose he would " leave the lap " later than the age of seven, the usual one of entry into the grammar schools. In the second chapter of the first book of his Institutes, Quintilian writes on the comparative merits of the public school and the private tutor in a vein which recalls Locke. Mingled with this main subject are sundry observations on general methods ; but there is nothing in any of it to suggest that 1 Book n. chap. i. i. SCHOOLS UNDER ROMAN EMPIRE 93 schools, as such, were not, in his time, an ancient institution in Rome. The problems which he raises, the advice he tenders, have an oddly familiar air to us of the twentieth century ; and the reader finds himself wondering why education is still an anxiety to the theorists and legislators, since the rationale of it was so thoroughly grasped in the first century. The arguments in favour of the private tutor, Quintilian reduces to two : he takes greater pre- cautions concerning his pupil's morals, and he devotes more time to him than a schoolmaster with a number of pupils can do. But, says this teacher, who, let us remember, has worked at his profession for twenty years, morals arc corrupted at home as well as at school : " The private tutor may be himself of bad character : nor is intercourse with vicious slaves at all safer than that with not particularly moral free-born youths." He is evidently of opinion that temperament is more responsible than environment : " It is the disposition of the pupil, and the care taken of him, that makes the whole difference." (It should be said that differ- ent texts render this sentence variously.) Quintilian adds a recommendation with which Locke must have been familiar : " If his disposition be good, and if there be not a blind and indolent negligence on the part of his parents, it will be possible for them to 94 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION select a tutor of irreproachable character (a matter to which the utmost attention is paid by sensible parents), and to fix on a course of instruction of the very strictest kind. 11 But, after all, the point of interest now is the arrangement of a Roman grammar school. Quin- tilian throws light on the system of classes, on class management, on individual attention to pupils ; and then he descants on the effects of public school education. He tells us, for instance, that in his own school which was probably presided over by Quintus Remmius Palaemon, the freed slave who became a famous Roman grammarian the masters l " divided the boys into classes, 11 and then "assigned them their order in speaking in conformity to the abilities of each. 11 Quintilian seems to have had no scruples about awaking the spirit of emulation, for he advo- cates school life on the ground that "the mind requires to be constantly excited and roused, 11 and remarks on the presence of this feeling in his old school : " Judgments were pronounced on the per- formances, and great was the strife among us for distinction ; but to take the lead of the class was by far the greatest honour. 11 He is absolutely convinced of the value to the individual of living in a diverse 1 ii. 23. SCHOOLS UNDER ROMAN EMPIRE 95 crowd which in one way or another spurs him on perpetually : sloth, rust, or the " empty conceit " of one " who compares himself to no one else, 11 struck him as worse snares than emulation : l "At home he can learn only what is taught himself; at school, even what is taught others. He will daily hear many things commended, many things corrected; the idleness of a fellow student, when reproved, will be a warning to him ; the industry of anyone, when commended, will be a stimulus; emulation will be excited by praise ; and he will think it a disgrace to yield to his equals in age, and an honour to surpass his seniors. All these matters excite the mind ; and though ambition itself be a vice, yet it is often the parent of virtues. 1 ' As to actual class management, it would appear that in many subjects Quintilian approved the method often labelled injuriously the lecture system : 2 " The instructions which are to be given to each may reach to many. Most of them, indeed, are of such a nature that they may be communicated to all at once with the same exertion of voice. 11 There can be no doubt that he attached great importance to the plan of letting the pupil do much work alone without supervision and help. This appears in his argument that a single pupil does 1 I. ii. 21, 22. 2 I. ii. 13. 96 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION not afford a tutor sufficient scope of his activity: " The tutor does not stand by the pupil while he is writing, or learning by heart, or thinking ; and when he is engaged in any of these exercises the company of any person whatsoever is a hindrance to him." The last sentence, in its emphatic approval of solitary effort, applies equally well to the schoolboy as to the object of private tuition. At the same time, (^uinlilian is not so wedded to class teaching, to the system which reaches and deals with many simul- taneously, that he cannot value the occasional use of " tutorial " help to individual schoolboys. He speaks of prcelectio which Spalding interprets as that indi- vidual explanatory instruction which a master gives to one pupil at a time : and again he assumes that the master will " have regard in his teaching, not so much to duty as to affection " ; and this being so, no \" master who is in the slightest degree tinctured with literature will fail particularly to cherish that pupil in whom he shall observe application and genius, even for his own honour." It is interesting to recollect that the famous Mantuan schoolmaster Vittorino da Feltre, who was a student of "the great Quintilian," proved the truth of this assertion. Prendilacqua writes : 1 "I remember that Vittorino, 1 Vittorino da Feltre attd other Humanist Educators, W. H. Woodward, p. 62. SCHOOLS UNDER ROMAN EMPIRE 97 now well advanced in years, would of a winter's morning come early, candle in one hand and book in the other, and rouse a pupil in whose progress he was specially interested; he would leave him time to dress, waiting patiently till he was ready; then he would hand him the book, and encourage him with grave and earnest words to high en- deavour." That Quintilian was a careful observer of children is seen in his remark, that besides the advantage of emulation in a school, the imitation of his peers is valuable to a boy ; " the imitation of their school- fellows is more pleasant than that of their master, for the very reason that it is more easy." Quintilian uses the word imitatio, so that his meaning is plain. Possibly Roman children differed from English in this, because of the latter one would be inclined to say, so far as any generalisation is possible, that they imitate their elders with some pleasure, but that they attach more importance to the opinion of their peers. It is evident that the keenness and variety of a . ^< u*m*^*^mm school appealed to Quintilian, for he refers feelingly to the dulness of private tuition : x " Masters them- selves, when they have but one pupil at a time with them, cannot feel the same degree of energy and 1 I. ii. 29. 7 98 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION spirit in addressing him, as when they are stimulated by a large number of hearers." Yet another advantage does he claim for school life : l "I say nothing of friendships formed at school, which remain in full force even to old age, as if cemented with a certain religious obligation ; for to have been initiated in the same studies is a not less sacred bond than to have been initiated in the same sacred rites." Quintilian comments on that difficulty, deep in the root of things, which besets each teacher, the variety of dispositions in hisjlock. It is sometimes said that the skilful teacher is distinguished from the unskilful by his capacity to deal with the dull and untoward pupil. Either this is untrue or Quintilian was an unskilful teacher, since he shows no longing for poor material : 2 " Let the boy be given to me whom praise stimulates, whom honour delights, who weeps when he is unsuccessful." He bars out corporal punishment, which fact those people, one can hardly call them teachers, who aim at correcting stupidity by the rod, may use to explain his liking for the quick. Quintilian was without doubt an innovator here. M. Boissier shows that the rod and the birch were in constant use in Roman schools : he describes a mural painting 1 I. ii. 20. 2 I. iii. 7. SCHOOLS UNDER ROMAN EMPIRE 99 found at Pompeii which depicts a school-beating in all its vigour. But Quintilian, like most humane teachers, retains severe discipline while he dispenses with beating : * "A child is as early as possible, therefore, to be admonished that he must do nothing too eagerly, nothing dishonestly, nothing without self control ; and we must always keep in mind the maxim of Virgil, Adeo in tenerls consuescere multum est, of so much importance is the acquisition of habit in the young." Lest anyone should suppose that the bow was ever kept on the stretch by Quintilian, it is well to add his remark : 2 " Nor will play in boys displease me : it is also a sign of vivacity ; and I cannot expect that he who is always dull and spiritless will be of an eager disposition in his studies, when he is indifferent even to that ex- citement which is natural to his age. 11 It has seemed more worth while to dwell upon these general observations than upon Quintilian's advice as to the curriculum. This latter for young boys included the study of grammar, as we under- stand the word, spelling, writing, reading, study of Latin and Greek authors (Homer and Virgil first, selected lyric poets, "the Greeks are licentious in many of their writings, and I should be loth to interpret Horace in certain passages " ; certain 1 I. iii. 13. 2 I. iii. 10. 100 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION comedies, jEsop, Cicero, and " those writings . . . which may best nourish the mind and enlarge the thinking powers ") l : music, geometry, astronomy, and elocution, as we should call it. After this training the boy is to enter the School of Rhetoric, a date too long deferred according to Quintilian in the current practice of his day. The general obser- vations give us a more lively picture, one invested with atmosphere and reality, of the inside of a Roman school, than any length of disquisition on the curriculum could do. From the above description an idea can be gained of both, i.e. of curriculum and general atmosphere, as they were awaiting the Christian community, if it should choose to avail itself of them. " The Grammar School,"" writes Dr. Bigg, 2 " was a powerful agent in the diffusion of Roman culture ; and under the Empire the system was extended with great rapidity into the most distant parts of the province. In Southern Gaul both Grammar and Rhetoric were taught from a very early date at Marseilles, Autun, Lyons, and Bordeaux. Later on we read of flourishing schools at Toulouse, Narbonne, Treves, and in all the chief cities of the Gallic provinces. The famous Agricola, who had received his own education at Marseilles, estab- 1 I. viii. 6. " The Church's Task wider the Empire, p. 7. SCHOOLS UNDER ROMAN EMPIRE 101 lished Roman schools for the sons of the native chieftains in newly conquered Britain ; and Juvenal tells us in his hyperbolical way that even Thule, the unknown North, is beginning to talk of hiring a professor of rhetoric. Spain also was covered with schools. Even little mining villages in the south of Portugal were not left unprovided ; and Augustine shows us that in Africa the same state of things existed. Everywhere the schoolmaster followed the standard, and the subdued barbarian was carefully drilled in the arts of peace." M. Boissier dwells on the fact that education followed the sword : l " Hardly had the Roman armies pene- trated into unknown regions before they founded schools in them : the rhetorician followed close on the heels of the victorious general, and they brought civilisation with them. Agricola's first care when he had pacified Brittany was to order that the children should be taught the liberal arts. . . . Hardly had Caesar conquered the Gauls before a school was opened at Antium. It flourished at once ; and we know that a few years later, in the reign of Tiberius, the children of the Gallic nobility came even in crowds to study grammar and rhetoric." _ The primitive Christian, however, was neither a 1 La Fin dn I'aganisuie, vol. i. p. 195. 102 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION barbarian nor subdued, and while he occasionally availed himself of the Roman system of education, he developed one of his own, which in such a place as Alexandria attained excellence, and a celebrity which is not the invariable corollary of excellence. CHAPTER IV. THE CATECHETICAL SYSTEM OF THE PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANS. IT was suggested at the close of the first chapter that the germ of the catechetical schools established and worked by the primitive Christians may be detected in the great Apostles 1 custom of gathering round them, for instruction and discipline, disciples and aspirants to the priesthood. The schools of post-apostolic times grew gradually wider in aim and scope, many of the later catechumens remaining laymen throughout their lives. Among the most famous of these institutions was the celebrated Christian School at Alexandria ; and again, the Catechetical Lectures of S. Cyril of Jerusalem, which have come down to us, afford the student of education interesting evidence of the thoroughness, and many indications of the method adopted in this region of primitive Christian work. 104 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION According to tradition, S. Mark was the founder of the Alexandrian School. S. Jerome, in his Lives of Illustrious Men? writes: "Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, wrote a short Gospel at the request of the brethren at Rome, embodying what he had heard Peter tell. When Peter had heard this, he approved it and published it to the Churches, to be read by his authority. . . . So, taking the Gospel which he himself composed, he " (i.e. Mark) "went to Egypt; -and first preaching Christ at Alexandria, he found a Church so admir- able in doctrine and continence of living, that he constrained all followers d>f Christ to his example. . . . He died in the eighth year of Nero' 1 (i.e. 62 A.D.), "and was buried at Alexandria, Ammianus succeeding him." In attributing the second Gospel to S. Mark, inspired by S. Peter, S. Jerome is only following the fourth century historian Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, who in his Ecclesiastical History wrote (citing the authority of Papias) as follows : 2 " And John the Presbyter also said this, Mark being the interpreter of Peter, whatsoever he recorded he wrote with great accuracy, but not, however, in the order in which it was spoken or done by our Lord, for he neither heard nor followed our Lord ; 1 Chap. viii. - Ecdes. Hist. iii. 39. THE CATECHETICAL SYSTEM 105 but, as before said, he was in company with Peter, who gave him such instruction as was necessary, but not to give a history of our Lord's discourses : wherefore Mark has not erred in anything, by writing some things as he has recorded them, for he was carefully attentive to one thing, not to pass by anything he heard, or to state anything falsely in these accounts." S. Jerome speaks of this Papias as " the pupil of John " ; and it is worth adding as a proof that neither sanctity nor Christian charity debarred Eusebius from perceiving intellectual differences between writers, that the bishop, while quoting from Papias as an authority for facts, describes him as "very limited in his comprehen- sion, as is evident from his discourses." S. Irenaeus (140 (5)-c. 202 A.D.) also furnishes an account of the origin of the four Gospels. The truth of his statements, in certain particulars, has been impugned : as, for example, when he tells us that " Matthew issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect." Nevertheless his story of the source and authorship of S. Mark accords with the tradition which was generally received in the early Church 1 : " Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, did also hand down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter." 1 Adv. Hier. bk. III. chap. i. 106 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION It is not possible here to discuss such a burning question as the authorship of a Gospel.; nor rele- vant, if it were possible. But it may be of interest to quote three sentences from Mr. Allen's con- tribution to Contentio Veritatw ; i.e. from the fifth chapter of that book, entitled, On Modern Criticism ami the New Testament, where he writes : " Of sources of S. Mark it is hardly possible to speak. Attempts to find traces of written sources in his Gospel have not yet won any general assent. The Church in the Second Century believed that his Gospel contained reminiscences of the preaching of S. Peter, and there is very little to be set against this tradition." Dr. Gore speaks of "the trust- worthy tradition which makes S. Mark's Gospel represent the preaching of Peter that part of his experience which he embodied in his primary in- struction." (The italics are mine.) The interest of this whole matter to the student of education lies in the fact that S. Mark is so generally regarded as S. Peter's pupil, as a scholar receiving definite and planned instruction. S. Jerome fathers his statement, that S. Mark founded the Alexandrian Church, on "Philo the Jew, an Alexandrian of the priestly class," to whom he attributes the authorship of a book on this Christian community. This volume, On a Con- THE CATECHETICAL SYSTEM 107 templative Life, has not been lost, though Philo's authorship has been doubted. Cardinal Newman adopts the view that S. Mark was the founder of the Alexandrian Church ; he says : 1 " The Alexandrian may peculiarly be called the Missionary and Polemical Church of Antiquity. ... Its cate- chetical school, founded (it is said) by the Evangelist himself, was a pattern to the Churches in its diligent and systematic preparation of Candidates for baptism ; while other institutions were added of a controversial character for the purpose of carefully examining into the doctrines revealed in Scripture, and of cultivating the habit of argument and disputation. While the internal affairs of the community were administered by the bishops, on these academical bodies as subsidiary to the divinely sanctioned system devolved the defence and pro- pagation of the faith, under the presidency of laymen or inferior ecclesiastics. Athenagoras, the first recorded master of the catechetical school, is known by his defence of the Christians, still extant, addressed to the Emperor Marcus" (I.e. Marcus Aurelius). From this description the student of education gleans at least an ear of information. The function of the Alexandrian school was not wholly theological. 1 Ariatis of (he Fourth Century. 108 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION it had a twofold aim, since it provided elementary instruction, and was also a school of that learning which is subsidiary and essential to the work of apologetics. Nevertheless Cardinal Newman seems to have accepted too easily the statement that Athenagoras was the first head of the school. The authority for it is Philip of Side, in Pamphylia, a writer who lived in the reign of Theodosius n., i.e. early in the fifth century, whose history, however, is not esteemed highly by scholars. 1 It appears that very little is known of Athenagoras. His English translator notes two authors who mention him, Methodius and the said Philip of Side. Gibbon cites Athenagoras as putting forth a "profane and absurd simile" 2 concerning the divinity of Jesus Christ: he does not locate the passage in the Defence of the Christians, and in chapter x. of that Apology, where Athenagoras discusses the nature of the Trinity, nothing like the suggestion of Gibbon appears. It is generally admitted that he was an Athenian who became a Christian. His two treatises, the one addressed to the Emperors Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, entitled, A Plea for the Christians, and the other on The Resurrection of the Dead, still 1 Ante-Nicene Christian Library, vol. ii. p. 274. z Decline and Fall, chap. xxi. THE CATECHETICAL SYSTEM 109 exist. In the first he is, par excellence, one of those philosophers, mentioned by Gibbon, who appeal for Tolerance for the Christians on the ground of the universal forbearance to all forms of religion shown under the Roman Empire. He cites the citizen of Ilium, the Lacedemonian, the Athenian, and the Egyptian as practising each his own form of religion, 1 "and to all these you and the laws give permission so to act, deeming on the one hand that to believe in no god at all is impious and wicked, and on the other that it is necessary for each man to worship the god he prefers. 11 Athenagoras goes on to beg the Emperors not to be " carried away by a name," and so to persecute the Christians. Throughout his pleading, he in- dicates his acquaintance with the poets and philosophers of Greece and Rome : once he pulls himself up suddenly with the question, addressed so aptly to the most philosophical of the Roman Emperors : " What need is there in speaking to you who have searched into every department of knowledge, to mention the poets? 11 as if the greatest of the Antonines could not need to be even reminded of the accumulated wisdom of antiquity ; as if an Athenian philosopher, when writing to him, might take all that for granted. 1 A Plea for the Christians, chap. i. 110 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION The value of a philosophical education is admitted by Athenagoras in his final appeal to Aurelius : u And now, do you, who are entirely in everything, by nature and by education, upright, moderate, and benevolent, and worthy of your rule, now that I have disposed of the several accusations and proved that we are pious, and gentle, and temperate in spirit, bend your royal head in approval." Again, in the concluding chapter of his other treatise, Athenagoras writes : " We shall make no mistake in saying that the final cause of an intelligent life and rational judg- ment is to be occupied uninterruptedly with those objects to which the natural reason is chiefly and primarily adapted, and to delight unceasingly in the contemplation of Him who is, and of His decrees, notwithstanding that the majority of men, because they are affected too passionately and too violently by things below, pass through life without attaining this object. 1 ' 1 It has seemed worth while to say thus much about this great Christian scholar of the second century ? because the tolerance and wide learning which inspire his two treatises make the reader wish it were possible to accept without any mis- giving the statement of Philip of Side, that he was really head of the Alexandrian catechetical THE CATECHETICAL SYSTEM 111 school. However that may be, it is not denied that he was a philosopher and that -he was a Christian; consequently, if he never presided over the school, yet his logical, learned, and stately theses may count on the credit side when the early Christians are condemned too hastily as the enemies of secular learning and education. We must turn from this most interesting man to an era of the catechetical school which is not shrouded in doubts. S. Jerome speaks of Pantaenus as the head of the catechetical school : he describes him as being "of great prudence and erudition," and adds : l " Many of his commentaries on Holy Scripture are indeed extant, but his living voice was of still greater benefit to the Churches."" It seems probable that the last sentence refers to his arduous work as a teacher of the catechumens. In one of his Letters, 2 S. Jerome, writing to Magnus, an Orator of Rome, has occasion to run through the list of Christian writers. Herein he describes Pantaenus as having "a great reputation for learning." Pantaenus was at first a famous philosopher of the Stoic school : on his conversion to Christianity he became the instructor of the catechumens. S. Jerome's story, that on account of his great reputation for learning he was sent 1 Lives of Illustrious Men, chap, xxxvi. - Epistle LXX. 112 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION by Demetrius, bishop of Alexandria, to India to preach Christ to the Brahmans and philosophers there, may not be true. If true, it proves that the ecclesiastical authorities of the second century adapted means to ends with more wisdom than some of their successors have done; and again, if true, it is a proof that the primitive Christians valued erudition in the most flattering way by using it to the best possible advantage when they despatched scholars to evangelise scholars. Eusebius, from whom S. Jerome probably bor- rowed some of these facts, remarks : <; Pantaenus, after many praiseworthy deeds, was finally at the head of the Alexandrian school, commenting on the treasures of divine truth, both orally and in his writings." In chap, xxxviii., 1 S. Jerome tells us more of this Alexandrian school : " Clemens, presbyter of the Alexandrian Church, and a pupil of the Pantaenus mentioned above, led the theological school at Alexandria after the death of his master, and was teacher of the Catechetes. Origen is known to been his disciple." There is an error here, if, as is the probability, S. Clement died one year before Pantaenus, i.e. in 215. The statement is only partially mistaken, for Pantaenus retired from the 1 Lives of Illustrious Men, THE CATECHETICAL SYSTEM 113 school after Clement became his colleague, and, as S. Jerome says, was succeeded by Clement. S. Clement was born about 160 A.D. It is not known whether that city or Athens was his birth- place, though opinion inclines to the latter. He seems in his student days to have wandered from one philosophical school to another in search of some knowledge which might satisfy him. In his Stromata (or Tapestry work) he speaks of " vigorous and animated discourses which I was privileged to hear, and of blessed and truly remarkable men." This passage refers to the time when he was listening to Christian teachers, for it is noticeable that he says " men," and is not therefore referring to Pantaenus only. This we gather, too, from another passage in his Stromata. Since we know that he was a student of classical literature and philosophy, and, therefore, presumably a judge of erudition in others, we may note these remarks as evidence of the e.steem in which a Christian could hold learning and teaching. It was to Pantscnus, however, that Clement's conversion was due; and in this connection it is interesting to remember again that Dr. Sandys writes: 1 "Clement of Alexandria is the earliest of the Greek Fathers who were specially con- 1 History of Classical Scholarship, p. 325. 8 114 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION spicuous for learning. 11 Some further light is thrown upon S. Clement's estimate of the achieve- ments of Pantaenus as well as upon his general standard of teaching by the following passage from the Stromata: 1 "Now this work of mine in writing is not artfully constructed for display, but my memoranda are stored up against old age as a remedy against forgetfulness, truly an image and outline of those vigorous and animated discourses which I was privileged to hear, and of blessed and truly remarkable men. . . .* 1 " Of these the one, in Greece an Ionic " (probably Tatian) the other in Magna Grsecia : (probably Theodotus) "the first of these from Coele-Syria, the second from Egypt, and others in the East. The one was born in the land of Assyria, the other a Hebrew in Palestine. When I came upon the last " (i.e. Pantsenus), " (he was the first in power), having tracked him out concealed in Egypt, I found rest. He, the true, the Sicilian bee, gathering the spoil of the flowers of the prophetic and apostolic meadow, engendered in the souls of his hearers a deathless element of knowledge." Tatian, to whom S. Clement alludes, was an 'Assyrian, who, after wide-reaching researches in the Literature and philosophy of Greece, became 1 Book I. chap. i. THE CATECHETICAL SYSTEM 115 acquainted with some of the writings of the early Christians. He is believed to have embraced the new faith at Rome. It is interesting to notice that, in his Address to the Greeks, he anticipates Tertullian's contention that the Greeks borrowed from Hebrew literature ; he writes, e.g. : l " Cease to make a parade of sayings which you have derived from others, and to deck yourself like the daw in borrowed plumes." And, again, further on he writes : 2 " Now it seems proper for me to demonstrate that our philosophy is older than the systems of the Greeks. Moses and Homer shall be our limits, each of them being of great antiquity ; the one being the oldest of poets and historians, and the other the founder of all barbaric wisdom. 11 This is a different aspect of Christian depreciation of classical learning to that suggested by Compayre, Symonds, and the rest. S. Clement taught in the Alexandrian school for thirteen years, first as the colleague and after- wards as the successor of Pantaenus. S. Jerome tells us that Origen was his pupil : 3 " Origen . . . when only eighteen years old . . . undertook the work of instructing the Catechetes in the 1 Chap. xxvi. 2 Chap. xxxi. 3 Lives of Illustrious Men, chap. liv. 116 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION scattered churches of Alexandria. Afterwards, appointed by Demetrius, bishop of this city, successor to the presbyter Clement, he flourished many years." Drane remarks : l " The child of a martyr, Origen had been the pupil of saints. He had been taught not only by S. Clement, but also by Hippolitus, bishop of Porto, the disciple of Irenseus, the disciple of Polycarp, the spiritual son of the Apostle of S. John. Hippolitus was a man of many sciences, a philosopher, a poet, and a mathematician." Eusebius 2 observes that Hippolitus wrote upon the computation of Easter, a matter which often occurs in the history of primitive Christian learn- ing, and which involved some knowledge of astronomy and arithmetic. Origen knew early the meaning of poverty, for while he was still a boy his father died, and his mother and six brothers were thus left to his sole care and exertions. His Greek learning enabled him to become a "Teacher of Grammar." Before he was eighteen his learning and his pedagogic capacity, joined to untiring charity, attracted the notice of Demetrius, bishop of 1 Christian Schools and Scholars, vol. i. p. IO. 2 Book vi. chap. xxii. THE CATECHETICAL SYSTEM 117 Alexandria, who appointed him master of the catechetical school, from which post S. Clement had fled on the outbreak of the fifth persecution, which occurred in the reign of Septimius Severus. Gibbon, with all the mildness of a person not immediately concerned, calls it " a mitigated persecution." Eusebius 1 records that it affected Alexandria with particular severity. A circumstance occurred at this moment of Origen's life which might be misinterpreted. The labours of the catechetical school obliged him to give up his other, his secular, teaching ; for his catechetical work he refused remuneration. Yet even a teacher must have some means of subsistence. Consequently, Origen sold the library which he had accumulated; not because as a Christian, or from any other cause, he despised learning and books, but because the buyer of his library agreed to pay him for life a salary of four obols per diem. On this exiguous income, equal to about sixpence a day of our money, Origen lived and taught for many years. We learn further from S. Jerome that Origen journeyed through Palestine to Athens and on to Rome, returning finally to Alexandria. "Im- mediately on his return to Alexandria," Jerome 1 Eccles. Hist. bk. vi. chap. i. 118 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION writes, u hc made Heraclas the presbyter, who continued to wear his philosophic garb, his assistant in the school of catechetes. Heraclas became bishop of the Church of Alexandria, after Demetrius." May we see, in the fact that Heraclas retained his philosopher's garb while teaching the cate- chumens, a proof, if a small one, of the friendliness of the Christians to learning? It is perhaps worth notice that Trypho, who proudly describes himself as " a Hebrew of the circumcision, observes when introducing himself to Justin Martyr, who was accustomed to preach the gospel in his philosopher's dress " I was instructed by Corinthus the Socratic in Argos, that I ought not to despise or treat with indifference those who array themselves in this dress, but to show them all kindness and to associate with them, as perhaps some advantage would spring from the intercourse either to some such man or to myself" (Dialogue of' Justin, Philosopher and Martyr, with Trypho a Jew, chap. i.). Out of Trypho's infinite condescension escapes the fact that in the second century another Christian teacher retained the learned garb. Alexandria did not stand alone in its care for the education of youth. As the Ante-Nicene THE CATECHETICAL SYSTEM 119 Father's name is connected with the Egyptian city, so is that of the Post-Nicene Father, S. Cyril, bound up with the catechetical school of Jerusalem. "Cyril," S. Jerome writes, 1 "Cyril, bishop of Jerusalem, often expelled by the Church, and at last received, held the Episcopate for eight con- secutive years in the reign of Theodosius. Certain Catechetical Lectures of his, compiled while he was a young man, are extant." S. Clement and S. Cyril both offer the student of education matter for consideration : from the works of the former it is possible to extract an idea of the Christian ideal of conduct, and of the means the educational means, using the adjective in a broad sense of achieving it ; from the works of the latter, examples can be drawn of the actual kind of teaching which was offered to the catechumens. But first a few words on the condition of these learners themselves seem necessary. The Greek word catechesis is only by a narrowing of its original meaning restricted to specially Christian teaching. Yet, even so, it covers a wide extent of ground, passing from the simplest fundamentals of the Christian faith to that partial elucidation of its deeper mysteries with which the wisest, the most 1 Lives of Illustrious Men, chap. cxii. 120 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION illuminated of men have been, by the limitations of human nature, compelled to content themselves. As the form of teaching varied in its passage from simplicity to profound complexity, so, as a natural consequence, the status of the catechumens differed ; and when we reflect that Christians were drawn from all classes of society, we realise that their intellectual capacities also must have differed almost indefinitely. The name was applied almost ex- clusively to candidates for baptism. Dr. Gifford, in his introduction to S. Cyril's Catechetical Lectures, remarks : " Though the title ' catechumen ' was not usually applied to those who had not already been baptized, it is probable that such children were admitted to the Lectures addressed to Catechumens both in the earlier and later stage of their preparation : for it seems to be implied in the passage quoted above from Cat. xv. 18 that admission was not limited to the candidates for baptism." The passage from S. Cyril to which Dr. Gifford refers runs as follows : l " If thou have a child according to the flesh, admonish him of this now ; if thou hast begotten one through catechising, put him also on his guard lest he receive the false one as the true." The number of grades of catechumens is estimated 1 Catechetical Lectures of S. Cyril, xv. 1 8. THE CATECHETICAL SYSTEM 121 differently : according to Canon XIV. of the Council of Nicaea there were two ; Bingham in his Antiquities reckons four ; Cardinal Newman (Arians of the Fourth Century) speaks of three. The latter thus describes the catechetical method : l "In the system of the early catechetical schools the TsAs/o/, or men-in- Christ, were such as had deliberately taken upon them the profession of believers: had made the vows and had received the grace of baptism, and were admitted to all the privileges and the revela- tions of which the Church had been constituted the dispenser. But before reception into this full discipleship a previous season of preparation, from two to three years, was enjoined, in order to try their obedience and instruct them in the principles of revealed truth. During this introductory dis- cipline they were called catechumens, and the teaching itself catechetical, from the careful and systematic examination by which their grounding in the faith was effected. The matter of the instruction thus communicated to them varied with the time of their discipleship, advancing from the most simple principles of nat'ural religion to the peculiar doctrines of the gospel, from moral truth to the Christian mysteries. On their first admission they were denominated audientes 1 .9. Cyril, Introd. p. xv. 122 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION (hearers), from the leave granted to them to attend the reading of the Scriptures and sermons in the church. Afterwards, being allowed to stay during the prayers, and receiving the imposition of hands as the sign of their progress in spiritual knowledge, they were called yovv^ivovrig (Benders of the knee) or ' sv^o^svoi ' (those who pray). Lastly, some short time before their baptism, they were taught the Lord's Prayer (the peculiar privilege of the regenerate), were entrusted with the knowledge of the creed, and, as destined for incorporation into the body of believers, received the titles of competentes (the qualified or competent) ' Electi ' (the chosen). Even to the last they were granted nothing beyond a formal and general account of the Articles of the Christian Faith : the exact and fully developed doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, and still more the doctrine of the Atonement as once made upon the Cross, and commemorated and appropriated in the Eucharist, being the exclusive possession of the serious and practised Christian." A period of two (or, according to Newman, two or three) years appears to have been the ordinary time of the Christian's probation as he passed from the simple beginning to the difficult close of his course. THE CATECHETICAL SYSTEM 123 When, later on, an account is given of the actual stuff of S. Cyril's Lectures, it will be seen that the charge of ignorance and educational carelessness cannot be levelled with any justice against the primitive Christians ; certainly it cannot be brought by an age like this, which spends so much less care on the production of character, on the moral and religious education of youth. It may be argued, perhaps, that the educational work of the Fathers proceeds wholly along one line the theological. It is not a tenable position ; but if it were, it is surely perverse and arbitrary in the extreme to extend the name of learning to Literature and Philosophy while denying it to Theology. Had the early Fathers propagated their doctrine with the narrowness and barren repetition of mere statement and parrot cries characteristic of certain modern Christian sects, the charge of ignorance, if not of carelessness, might lie. But some of them at least urged their teaching with all the resources of a penetrating logic, a dialectic skill, a grace of language, a wealth of ornament and illustration, reminiscent of classic \ Greece and Rome, which ought to relieve them for t ever froni accusations of ignorance, carelessness, and - lack of erudition. CHAPTER V. S. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA. EUSEBIUS, in his Ecclesiastical History, mentions the following works of Clement of Alexandria : the Stromata, in eight books; the Hypoty 'poses or Institutions, "a book of exhortation addressed by him to " the Greeks " (which is generally called the Exhortation to the Heathen)-, the Pccdagogue, a treatise called What Rich man may be saved ? ; one on the Passover ; an exhortation to Patience addressed to Neophytes, and the Ecclesiastical Canon. Eusebius observes that S. Clement " quoted from the Gentiles where he finds any useful remark with them," and adds that his works " also abound in a great variety of other " (i.e. secular) " learning." Dr. Sandys says : " Clement of Alexandria is the earliest of the Greek Fathers who were specially conspicuous for learning." Of his works those most interesting to the student of education are the 124 S. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA 125 Stromata or Tapestry work, and the Pcedagogue. In any educational treatise, or in one even bearing upon education, there are many matters on which we should expect remarks ; on learning proper, on discipline and training, on manners, demeanour, and recreation. What then has S. Clement to say upon these in the Tutor or Paedagogue? Very little, if anything, does he write directly upon the subject- matter of secular learning, very much upon " illumi- nation " or knowledge of God ; " we are illuminated," he writes, " which is to know God. 11 1 The Instructor, or Pedagogue, is Christ. That the aim of the Instructor is the inculcation of religious, not secular, knowledge is perfectly clear from a sentence which occurs early in the treatise : " The Instructor being practical, not theoretical, His aim is thus to improve the soul, not to teach^ and to train it up to a virtuous, not to an in- tellectual life." 2 In common fairness, however, S. Clement's view of learning in the Pcedag'ogtte should be compared with that which is given in his Address to the Greeks (or Exhortation to the Heathen). Against the man who could write " But'we have no sensible image of sensible matter, but an image that is perceived 1 Pedagogue, bk. I. chap. vi. 2 Ibid. bk. I. chap. i. 126 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION by the mind alone God, who alone is truly God " * the accusation of belittling the mind and its appurtenances cannot lie justly. Again he writes: "For into all men whatever, especially those who are occupied with intellectual pursuits, a certain divine effluence has been instilled." 2 It cannot be said so truly that S. Clement dis- dained knowledge, as that he considered the Greek to be "maimed with respect to the truth," while the genuine Christian was, on the contrary, in communication with the Source of all possible know- ledge. This position he states quite clearly in the \Exhortation to the Heathen : Chap. xi. " Wherefore since the Word Himself has come to us from Heaven, we need not, I reckon, go any more in search of human learning to Athens and the rest of Greece, and to Ionia. For if we have as our Teacher Him that filled the Universe with His holy energies in creation, salvation, beneficence, legislation, prophecy, teaching, we have the Teacher from whom all instruction comes ; and the whole world, with Athens and Greece, has already become the domain of the Word." We may feel that S. Clement was oversanguine concerning the tolerance and intellectual width of some Christians, that he esteemed somewhat too 1 Address to the Greeks, chap. iv. a Ibid. p. 70. S. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA 127 lightly the place of Greece in the scheme of the world's development ; but it is one thing to condemn knowledge (as the Christians are accused of doing), and quite another to be mistaken or unappreciative concerning some of its methods and instruments. At the same time, the aim of the Pcedagogue is undoubtedly moral rather than intellectual, as the following passage indicates : " As there is one mode of training for philosophers, another for orators, and another for athletes, so there is a generous dis- position suitable to the choice that is set upon moral loveliness resulting from the training of Christ. And in the case of those who have been trained according to this influence, their gait in walking, their sitting at table, their food, their sleep, their going to bed, their regimen and the rest of their mode of life acquire a superior dignity." 1 If our attention is not directly drawn here to scholarship and learning, yet S. Clement is dealing with matters forming an integral part of a com- prehensive education, matters specially needing attention in his time. These things cannot indeed be excluded from any really educational system ; did not John Locke perhaps the most highly esteemed of English educational writers, as he is certainly one of the most observant and penetrating himself 1 Book i. chap. xii. 128 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION defer the subject of actual learning to the very end of his volume, while he rambled with surprising elaboration and repetition over the whole business of rearing and bringing children up? Matters which are admittedly a part of education in the hands of Locke do not become something entirely alien to it because they are treated by a Christian Father of the second century ; details of discipline, wealth, dress, companions, recreation, demeanour, manners are as much the stuff of educational problems in the Pedagogue as they are in the Thoughts concerning Education. S. Clement's order when he tells us that "the all-benignant Word first exhorts, then trains, and finally teaches " is strikingly similar to Locke's arrangement of educational methods. Dr. Kaye, sometime Bishop of Lincoln, renders a passage in the opening paragraph of the Pcedagogue thus : " It is the same Word, Who now by ex- hortation, now by precept, now by persuasion, rescues man from the dominion of worldly habit, and leads him to the salvation which is of faith in God." This, which is rather a rendering of the whole paragraph than a literal translation of a single sentence of S. Clement, suggests almost that the modern psychological analysis of human activity into reason, feeling, and will was present in germ to S. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA 129 the Christian Father, exhortation being the appeal to reason, precept the appeal to will or organ of action, and persuasion the appeal to feeling. S. Clement's view of discipline is to be found in the sixth chapter of the first book. In this chapter it is true that he is not speaking of school discipline, strictly so called. The whole thing is an analogy, a picture of one thing by looking at which we may, if we choose, learn something about another. His plan in the Pcedagogue is to treat the Christian community as one great schoolhouse; Christian people, as her scholars ; and Christ, the Logos, the Heavenly Word, the right Reason, as the In- structor or Paedagogue. This view is nowhere more lucidly expressed than it is at the end of the eleventh chapter of the first book : " It is clear that One alone true, good, just, in the image and likeness of the Father, His Son Jesus, the Word of God is our Instructor; to whom God hath intrusted us, as an affectionate Father commits his children to a worthy tutor, expressly charging us, ' This is my beloved Son : hear Him. 1 " From this, then, it is obvious that everything which S. Clement says is merely analogous to the circumstances of an actual school for children. But if this be clearly grasped and remembered, there is still much to be learned from his treatise of the 9 130 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION Christian outlook on education. Moreover, it is worthy of notice that S. Clement is willing to in- corporate Greek wisdom into his Christian system, as, for example, when he writes : l " Thus also Plato, knowing reproof to be the greatest power for reformation and the most sovereign purification, in accordance with what has been said observes ' that he who is in the highest degree impure is uninstructed and base, by reason of his being un- reproved in those respects in which he who is destined to be truly happy ought to be purest and best.'" S. Clement's method of discipline it would not be unfair to call a system of fear tempered by mercy ; this description accords with a sentence in the Address to the Greeks, where he writes : 2 " You have received, O man, the divine promise of grace ; you have heard the opposite threat of punishment. By these the Lord saves, disciplining- man by fear and grace." In the Pcedagogue he writes : 3 " The bitter roots of fear then arrest the eating sores of our sins, wherefore also fear is salutary, if bitter 1 '; and then he holds up the other side of the shield : 4 1 Address to the Greeks, bk. I. chap. ix. 2 Writings and Opinions of Clement of Alexandria, Bishop Kaye. * Book I. chap. ix. * Ibid. S. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA 131 " You may learn if you will the crowning wisdom of the all-holy Shepherd and Instructor, of the omnipotent and paternal Word, when He figura- tively represents Himself as the Shepherd of the Sheep. And He is the Tutor of the Children. He says therefore by Ezekiel, directing His discourse to the elders, and setting before them a salutary description of His wise solicitude : ' And that which is lame I will bind up, and that which is sick I will heal, and that which has wandered I will turn back ; and I will feed them on My holy mountain." Interpreting the spirit of this passage, and apply- ing it to the pupils in an actual school, we find that S. Clement attributes to the Instructor a system of wise discrimination ; a method which aims at discerning, at diagnosing the cause of failure, and then applying the appropriate remedy. Saner educational theory and practice could hardly be devised. He carefully differentiates the various modes of disciplinary method : the following are the chief of those which he enumerates: 1 (1) "Admonition is the censure of loving care, and produces understanding." (2) " Upbraiding is censure of what is base, con- ciliating to what is noble." 1 Book I. chap, ix. 132 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION (3) "Complaint is censure of those who are regarded as despising or neglecting."" (4) "Invective is a reproachful upbraiding or chiding censure." (5) " Reproof is the bringing forward of sin, laying it before one." (In chap, x., S. Clement is rather more explicit on this point ; he says : " Chiding is also called admonishing ; and the etymology of admonishing is putting of under- standing into one; so that rebuking is bringing one to one's senses.") (6) " Bringing one to his senses is censure, which makes a man think." (7) " Visitation is severe rebuke." (8) " Denunciation is vehement speech. And He employs denunciation as medicine." (This remark recalls the observation of a writer whose era and general surroundings were strangely unlike S. Clement's, viz. Michel de Montaigne, "Punishment acts as medicine for children." Essais n. xxxi., de la cholere.) (9) " Accusation is censure of wrong-doers." (10) "Objurgation is objurgatory censure." (11) " Indignation is a rightful upbraiding." The fact that this skilful analysis of the different ways and means of reproof refers obviously and admittedly to Christ's government of the Church, S. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA 133 cannot suppress in the reader's mind the suspicion that the ability thus to understand and to set forth these different methods may have grown in large measure out of S. Clement's own pedagogic experience as head of the famous catechetical school of Alexandria. No one surely but a person accus- tomed to meet and deal with the varying needs and infirmities of youth still in statu pupillari could have shown this minute acquaintance with, this apt handling of, the great educational problem of discipline. It is not fair to suppose that the mundane practice suggested the religious theory ; but it is perhaps fair to say that the method whereby divine doctrine was set forth could hardly have been so perfectly handled save by one who, in the world of human education, had been forced to come to close quarters with the need for it. Though S. Clement dwells at length on Christ's rebukes, yet the method of the Instructor is repre- sented again at the end of the chapter as a mingling of justice with mercy: "For as the mirror is not evil to an ugly .man because it shows him what like he is ; and as the physician is not evil to the sick man because he tells him of his fever, for the physician is not the cause of the fever, but only points out the fever, so neither is He that reproves ill-disposed towards him who is diseased in soul. 134 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION For He does not put the transgressions on him, but only shows the sins which are there, in order to turn him away from similar practices. So God is good on His own account, and just also on ours, and He is just because He is good." From a chance phrase in the Address to the Greeks we may gather that S. Clement is advocating a milder method than that which was usual in his day ; that gentleness in teaching was not universal, we may judge from the following words : " O surpassing love for man ! Not as a teacher speaking to his pupils, not as a master to his domestics, nor as God to men, but as a father does the Lord gently admonish His children." 1 A few other passages from the first book of the Pccdagogue throw considerable light on S. Clement's view of education ; and they have, besides, intrinsic interest for us of a so different world, as we busy ourselves with the problems and difficulties of bringing up children. We must not forget, how- ever, that in applying these scraps of his method to modern school life, we are wresting them from their original meaning, where Christ is the school- master and Christian men and women the scholars. He tells us, for instance, that the Instructor "cares for the whole nature"; that men and 1 Address to the Creeks, chap. ix. S. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA 135 women 1 alike are the objects of the Instructor's care. 2 In the tenth chapter he has something to say which might benefit those who fancy that school life can be all pleasant, a place even where punishment should be abolished : " The plan of dealing strin- gently with humanity is good and salutary"; 8 further on, he writes in a similar strain : " I say then that praise or blame, or whatever resembles praise or blame, are medicines most essential of all to men. Some are ill to cure, and, like iron, are wrought into shape with fire, and hammer, and anvil, that is, with threatening and reproof and chastisement ; while others . . . grow by praise." Long before psychology had a name this Christian Father had learned some of its lessons. In chap. xi. he returns to the question of the value of severity and chastisement : " The pungency and the purifying virtue of punishment are profitable on account of its sharpness."" Yet any impression that S. Clement^ method is wholly one of severity or gloom would be erroneous, for he prizes a quality too little cultivated and engendered by all educational systems alike: "Let us anoint ourselves," he exhorts us, "with the perennial immortal bloom of gladness that oint- 1 The Pedagogue, bk. I. chap. ii. 8 Book I. chap. iv. 3 Book I. chap. x. 136 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION nient of sweet fragrance." He would not teach us, as some people seem inclined to do, that virtue is increased by the unpleasantness of an action. S. Clement turns from recommendations for the welfare of mind and heart to those touching the body, to the physical needs of man. Every reader of Locke's Thoughts concerning' Education will remember the emphatic opening pages dealing with hygiene, the absolute importance of which is insisted upon in the sentence: ( 1) "A sound Mind in a sound Body is a short but full description of a Happy State in this World. He that has these two has little more to wish for ; and he that wants either of them will be but little the better for any thing else." After that warning, Locke proceeds to give advice on food, drink, clothing, sleep, and other matters connected with health and strength and sound development. S. Clement's aim, when he touches on these questions, is, of course, less mundane than Locke's was ostensibly ; but still we ought to remember that beneath the chilly commonsense of the English- man lay a sincere reverence for religion. Con- sequently it is not in the least strange that we should find their views similar. The following passage, with a few very slight changes, would not seem out of place among Locke's temperate S. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA 137 counsels: "The Instructor 1 enjoins us to eat that we may live. For neither is food our business, nor pleasure our aim ; but both are on account of our life here, which the Word is training up to immortality. Wherefore also there is discrimination to be employed in reference to food. And it is to be simple, truly plain, suiting precisely simple and artless children as ministering to life, not to luxury. And the life to which it conduces consists of two things health and strength ; to which plainness of fare is most suit- able, being conducive both to digestion and light- ness of body, from which come growth and health and right strength; not strength that is wrong, or dangerous and wretched, as is that of athletes produced by compulsory feeding." A little further on in the same chapter he repeats this warning : " Those who use the most frugal fare are the strongest and the healthiest and the noblest ; as domestics are healthier and stronger than their masters, and husbandmen than the proprietors; and not only more robust but wiser, as philosophers are wiser than rich men. For they have not buried the mind beneath food, nor deceived it with pleasures." S. Clement's care, we notice, is for the mind, for 1 Book II. chap. i. 138 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION the understanding, which Locke prized at so high a rate. It is curiously instructive, curiously suggestive of the antiquity of novelty, when we find this second century Father giving the advice of our con- temporary physicians ; as, for instance, when he warns us against the agglomeration of different foods: "We must 1 therefore reject different varieties, which engender various mischief, such as a depraved habit of body and disorders of the stomach, the taste being vitiated by an unhappy art that of cookery, and the useless art of making pastry. Antiphanes, the Delian physician, said that this -variety of viands was the one cause of disease 1 '; and once again, when he advocates the use of wholemeal bread : " They emasculate plain food, namely, bread, by straining off the nourishing part of the grain." S. Clement- could hit as hard as S. Paul himself. He has enumerated the dainties which human luxury has invented, and adds of the consumer of them : " A man like this seems to me to be all jaw and nothing else." At the same time he is not a bigot, scarcely even ascetic : " We do not abolish social intercourse," he observes ; 2 and again : " We are not, then, to abstain wholly from various 1 Book II. chap. i. 2 Ibid. S. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA 139 kinds of food, but only are not to be taken up about them. We are to partake of what is set before us, as becomes a Christian, out of respect to him who has invited us, by a harmless and moderate participation in the social meeting." His general moderation appears in the sentence, "Excess, which in all things is an evil, is very highly reprehensible in the matter of food."" Now all this, uttered in the spirit which inspired pur own greatest educational writer, loses none of its pedagogic value because it is not avowedly meant, as Locke's advice was, for the private tuition of a gentleman, or as a treatise of our day would be intended probably for the assistance of secondary schoolmasters and mistresses. The fact that these recommendations are addressed to the whole Christian community, that they are intended as a guide for the upbringing of each and every member, robs them of no iota of their educational value. In the History of Education it is the spirit not the letter which is significant ; in the course of so many centuries, external circumstances have altered of necessity ; yet the fundamentals of human character, consequently of human training, have remained even curiously the same. Moreover, he has young people actually in his mind at times, eg. when he quotes Plato's opinion 140 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION that "not one man under heaven, if brought up from his youth in such practices " (i.e. in the midst of luxury and overfeeding), " will ever turn out a wise man." From the consideration of food S. Clement passes to that of drink. Like Immanuel Kant, the Father forbids wine to children. He argues from S. Paul's recommenda- tion to Timothy that water is the natural beverage of the liealthy. Yet here again he is no sour ascetic ; for " towards evening, about supper-time, wine may be used, when we are no longer engaged in more serious reading." l His reason for allowing it is expressed quaintly, with perhaps a Platonic reminiscence. " First, wine makes the man who has drunk it more benignant than before, more agree- able to his companions, kinder to his domestics, and more pleasant to his friends." 5 A warning follows, to mitigate its possibly hurtful qualities by the admixture of water. "For both are works of God ; and so the mixture of both, of water and of wine, conduces together to health, because life consists of what is necessary and of what is useful." 3 His description of drunkenness is vivid ; his con- demnation of it absolute. 1 Book II. chap. ii. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. S. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA 141 Probably no one will deny that a part of educa- tion consists in training the artistic side of human nature. The process may be performed in more ways than one, e.g., the ascetic, the puritan, will endeavour to eradicate the aesthetic sense ; the apostle of beauty will cultivate it to riotous excess. That there is a wise mean between these two will probably be the dictum of the average educator. S. Clement inclines to the ascetic view. He includes under one comprehensive ban cups of silver and gold, cups inlaid with precious stones, or of curious and elaborate shapes, vessels of chased glass, silver couches and table utensils, articles of rare wood, costly furniture, purple hangings, " proofs of taste- less luxury, cunning devices of envy and effeminacy are all to be relinquished, as having nothing whatever worth our pains." 1 It cannot be denied that his sweeping condemna- tion of all beautiful works of art gives a convenient handle to critics of Christian asceticism. Nor would S. Clement wish, one fancies, that any palliation of his position should be offered. The tolerance meted out to the classics and to wine is cut off short, and beautiful things are banned without remorse. lint though palliation is disallowid. explanation may be offered. S. Clement lived 1 Book II. chap. iii. 142 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION through the reign of Commodus, the emperor whom Gibbon described as " dissolved in luxury," l and the virtues of the Emperor Pertinax could not wipe out the recollection of the vices of his predecessor. An odd circumstance, of some relev- ance here, is the condemnation of beautiful things as an element in education by Locke and Rousseau. They lived in an era unlike S. Clements; yet in this particular they were strangely severe. Readers of Locke's Thoughts concerning Education 2 will re- member the passage where he writes : ( 37) " The Coverings of our Bodies which are for Modesty, Warmth, and Defence are by the Folly or Vice of Parents recommended to their Children for other uses. They are made matters of Vanity and Emula- tion. A Child is set a-longing after a new Suit, for the Finery of it ; and when the little Girl is tricked up in her new Gown and Commode, how can her Mother do less than teach her to admire herself by calling her Jier little Queen and her Princess ? Thus the little ones are taught to be proud of their Clothes before they can put them on." Rousseau takes up a still more illogical position in aesthetics; he permits a child to prefer a gay colour to a sombre, but he bars out entirely a 1 Decline and Fall, chap. iv. 2 Locke, p. 23, S. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA 143 "rich stuff." 1 Yet why? "Richness 11 is often as great an element of beauty as colour. AVho does not know that the texture of an iris flower is as exquisite an essential in the whole as its form or colour? It does not seem, however, to occur to Rousseau that beauty of texture may be a legitimate source of pleasure; he traces it sternly to an instinct for pomp and luxury. S. Clement, Locke, Rousseau, widely dissevered in race, era, and environment as they were, yet Join hands in a condemnation which, if carried rigorously into effect, would truncate education to a serious degree. Perhaps the real explanation is that they all three lacked the artistic sense ; though, when we recollect Rousseau's description of the sunset, we hardly feel that this is sufficient explanation of his view. As a natural corollary to his condemnation of costly and beautiful ornaments, follows S. Clement's rule on clothing and adorning the body. This is interesting not only in itself, but as a succinct and vivid picture of the customs of the day : " What are we to imagine ought to be said of love of ornament, and dyeing of wool, and variety of colours, and fastidiousness about gems, and exquisite work- ing of gold, and still more, of artificial hair and 1 Emile, bk. iv. 144 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION wreathed curls ; and furthermore of staining the eyes, and plucking out hairs, and painting with rouge and white lead, and dyeing of the hair, and the wicked arts that are employed in such decep- tions?" 1 He admires "that ancient city of the Lacedemonians'" which, "interdicting respectable women from love of ornament," kept "flowered clothes and ornaments of gold " for the disreputable outcasts from society. It must be admitted that S. Clement's sumptuary laws would, if carried into effect, condemn us to a drab world. We may agree with him when he says : "The covering ought, in my judgment, to show that which is covered to be better than itself, as the image is superior to the temple, the soul to the body, and the body to the clothes " ; 2 and while we regret that his condemnation of luxury, effeminacy, and vain futility overshot its mark, we may reflect upon the difficulties in which moderation must have found itself involved in the reign of Commodus. S. Clement's attention descends even to shoes : " The use of shoes is partly for covering, partly for defence in case of stumbling against objects, and for saving the sole of the foot from the roughnesses of hilly paths. 1 ' 3 1 Book II. chap. xi. p. 256. 2 Book II. chap. xi. 3 Book XII. S. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA 145 To women, shoes are permitted : a " white one " at home, a greased and nailed shoe on a journey, for " woman is a tender thing, easily hurt," a sentence that reads oddly beside certain of Eusebius 1 descriptions of women martyrs contemporary with Clement, notably, e.g.^ that of the " celebrated Potamicena," x to whom, in the words of the ecclesi- astical historian, torture was applied " gradually by little and little, from her feet up to the crown of her head." To men on military service, shoes are permitted ; otherwise "for a man bare feet are quite in keeping." In his chapter, "Against excessive fondness for jewels and gold ornaments," S. Clement attempts to turn the flank of the obvious argument that it cannot be wrong to use the gifts of God. It is not particularly convincing to the lover of moderation in all things, but it is interesting as a specimen of his _power of literary expression : " First necessaries, such as water and air, He supplies free to all ; and what is not necessary He has hid in the earth and water. Wherefore ants dig, and griffins guard gold, and the sea hides the pearl-stone. But ye busy yourselves about what you need not. Behold, the whole heaven is lighted up, and ye seek not God ; 1 Eusebivis, Eccles. Hist, bk. VI. chap. v. IO 146 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION but gold which is hidden, and jewels, are dug up by those among us who are condemned to death." * Perhaps S. Clement's antithesis is over-sharp and crude ; certainly it is for those who appreciate the effect which Job produced by magnifying the worth of the gold of Ophir and the topaz of Ethiopia, only to eclipse the piled up wealth of the Orient by the mere mention of Wisdom and Understanding. Yet for all that we can in great measure sympathise when he cries, " I am weary and vexed at enumera- ting the multitude of ornaments, and I am compelled to wonder how those who bear such a burden are not worried to death. O foolish trouble ! O silly craze for display." 2 He quotes a passage from the " comic poet Alexis " which suggests that the women of his own time had not improved on those of days already gone by. These lines, indicating with minute detail the devices resorted to for the improve- ment of nature's supposed deficiencies, are equally applicable to the fashionable follies of our own time ; another proof, were one needed, that the funda- mental weaknesses of human nature persist from age to age : "Is one of them little? She stitches cork into her shoe-sole. Is one tall? She wears a thin sole, And goes out keeping her head down on her shoulder ; 1 Chap. xiii. 2 Ibid. S. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA 147 This takes away from her height. Has one no hips? She has something sewed on to her, so that the spectators May exclaim on the fine shape behind. Has one yellow eyebrows? She stains them with soot. Do they happen to be black ? She smears them with ceruse. Is one very white skinned? She rouges. Has one any part of the body beautiful ? She shows it bare, Has she beautiful teeth? She must needs laugh, That those present may see what a pretty mouth she has," and so on, in a strain only too easily understood by any observant student of human nature. S. Clement * regards " fondness for finery " as a greater vice than "Love of dainties and love of wine," apparently because the passion for these things is, in his eyes, insatiable : '"A full table and repeated cups' are enough to satisfy greed. But to those who are fond of gold, and purple, and jewels, neither the gold that is above the earth and below it is sufficient, nor the Tynan Sea, nor the freight that comes from India and Ethiopia, nor yet Pactolus flowing with gold ; not even were a man to become a Midas would he be satisfied, but would be still poor, craving other wealth. Such people are ready to die with their gold/ 1 And even S. Clement, knowing as an experienced teacher that exhortation, tinged with admiration 1 Book in. chap. ii. 148 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION and regard, will persuade sometimes where condem- nation fails, concludes with the following appeal : "Is it not monstrous that while horses, birds, and the rest of the animals spring and bound from the grass and meadows, rejoicing in orna- ment that is their own, in mane, and natural colour, and varied plumage; women, as if inferior to the brute creation, should think herself so unlovely as to need foreign, bought and painted, beauty ? " l The luxury and love of costly adomment which S. Clement prohibits for women, he forbids to men with at least equal severity. Compayre has observed that S. Jerome prohibits baths to girls, and only allows them to any children under exceptional circumstances. This charge may be investigated more suitably in the chapter upon S. Jerome ; but it is interesting here to notice that S. Clement not only permits, but enjoins the use of a bath " for cleanliness. 11 2 He prohibits itjfor mere pleasure, "for the sake of heat it is a superfluity, since one may restore what is frozen by the cold in other ways. 11 Christians have been accused from time to time of undervaluing cleanliness. It would be idle to deny the charge in toto : equally idle, perhaps, to 1 Book in. chap. U. 2 Book in. chap. ix. S. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA 149 deny -that it is often exaggerated. S. Clement, at any rate, while utterly condemning the current Roman abuse of the bath, is emphatic concemino- its lawful use; though even so he draws a dis- tinction between men and women : " The bath is to be taken by women for cleanliness and health, by men for health alone."" 1 One of his complaints against those " who minister before the idols " is that they "never come near a bath. 11 One sentence in this chapter may surprise and gratify those who expect nothing but asceticism and severity from a primitive Christian: "Due proportion, which on all occasions we call as our helper in life, suffices us." S. Clement has been called the most learned of the early Christian Fathers. Is this an echo of the Platonic philosophy which exalted " temperance."' that " harmony or due proportion of the higher and lower elements of human nature," so difficult, even impossible, to define, yet exemplified in the beautiful youth Charmides? i Again it is interesting to observe that S. Clement advocates bodily exercises for men and for women. For the latter he suggests the more active of domestic employments; for the former, while he does not prohibit gymnastic feats, he suggests 1 Address to the Greeks, chap. x. 150 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION useful labour, handling the hoe, turning the mill, cutting wood, and so forth, seeming to argue that healthiness does not begin in an occupation where usefulness ends, a fact sometimes overlooked or forgotten. S. Clement insists as strongly as Locke, though much more tersely, on the importance of good companions ; he points his advice with the scathing observation that since Moses "forbade the ancient people to partake of swine,"" all Christian people should eschew the companionship of those whose life is animal and swinish. And he insists, further, that if religion is to be a real thing, it is not to be kept for exceptional opportunities, but is to enter, though unobtrusively, into each and every transaction of life. "Let not him who sells or buys aught, name two prices for what he buys or sells. 111 "Study to speak the truth. 11 "Let swearing be banished." And if an example of S. Clement's genuineness, of his sincerity be wanted, the following, acutely observant of ordinary life, may suffice, "Love is not tested by a kiss, but by kindly feeling. 11 And again he writes : " What means a fast then ? . . . Loose every band of wickedness. Dissolve the knots of oppressive contracts. Let the oppressed go free, and tear every unjust bond. Break thy 1 Book in. chap. xi. S. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA 151 bread to the hungry, and lead the houseless poor into thy house."" l Possibly some people may argue that all this is not a question of education, but of the inculcation of Christianity. No doubt Christianity has shed light and warmth on ethics; or rather, it has established an ethics aglow with those qualities; yet we may remember that Pestalozzi, whose "religion" was challenged publicly, who was sus- pected by Romanists and persecuted by Protestants, wrote a document addressed to the benefactors of humanity on behalf of outcast children whom he desired to educate; and that that document con- tained passages germane in spirit and not alien in expression to the sentences quoted from S. Clement's Poedagogue. The Miscellanies and the Exhortation to the Heathen may be dealt with more conveniently in another chapter. Perhaps enough has been said already to justify Drane's verdict on S. Clement : " No one understood better than he the emptiness of human learning when pursued as an end, or its serviceableness when used as a means. His end was to win souls to Christ ; and to reach it he laid hands indifferently on all the intellectual weapons that fell within his reach : poetry and philosophy, 1 Book in. chap. xii. 152 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION science and even satire; he neglected nothing that would serve his turn." l If the Pcedagogue alone seem scarcely evidence to prove that conclusion, ample reinforcement may be found in the erudition of the Address to the Greeks. 1 Christian Schools and Scholars, vol. i. chap. i. p. 9. CHAPTER VI. S. CYRIL OF JERUSALEM. IT is perhaps worth while to insist once more upon the fact that the Fathers" of the Church were called upon to deal primarily with the circumstances of their own age; not with those of days gone by, nor with those of days to come. That is one side of the truth. But if circumstances change quickly and greatly, human nature alters slowly and little. Always, though it is often overlooked and some- times denied, the main aim of education is develop- ment of capacity. Instruction is less an end than a means. Of human capacities, that of sound thought leading to sound judgment is perhaps the most valuable. It depends on the exercise of will and on the right training of what Locke called understanding. To present knowledge or hypothesis so that it exercised a pupil's thought, so that it forced him to honest intellectual effort, ir,3 154 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION that was a teacher's business in S. Cyril's age as J O it is in our own. And if it may be said with reverence, one might urge that the Doctrine of the Trinity affords matter for true educational training as much as the theory of evolution, as the methods of constructing the Forth Bridge, or as the work of the grammarian when he "settled Hotfs business . . . Properly based Oun " I If this be allowed, S. Cyril's work as a catechist must be admitted into the circle of educational endeavour: a brief survey of his lectures will indicate clearly enough that his pupils were called upon to think, to put forth intellectual effort, to discipline the will, to arrive at sound j udgment. He was fortunate in his time, for he lived and worked at Jerusalem during the reign of the first nominal Christian emperor, Constantine ; his diaconate probably belongs to the year 334 A.D., or possibly to the early part of 335. In the latter year there was a great gathering in Jeru- salem when the Christians assembled for the consecration of Constantine's church on Mount Calvary. Eusebius in his Life of Constantine l observes that "Jerusalem became the gathering 1 Life of Constant iue, iv. 43. S. CYRIL OF JERUSALEM 155 point for distinguished prelates from every province, and the whole city was thronged by a vast assem- blage of the servants of God . . . the whole of Syria and Mesopotamia, Phoenicia and Arabia, Palestine, Egypt, and Libya, with the dwellers in the Thebaid, all contributed to swell the mighty concourse of God's ministers, followed as they were by vast numbers of every province." The young deacon Cyril was thus a witness, not only of an immense concourse assembled together to do honour to an emperor and to worship God, but he also witnessed the triumph of Arius and his party over the recently deposed Athanasius, who had been condemned by the Synod of Tyre earlier in this same year 335 A,D. That the Christian Church was highly organised at this time is suggested by a passage in the Encyclical Epistle of S. Athanasius, written in 341 : l " Our Canons and our forms were not given to the Churches at the present day, but were wisely and safely transmitted to us from our forefathers. Neither had our faith its beginning at this time, but it came down to us from the Lord through His disciples. That, therefore, the ordinances which have been preserved in the Churches from old 1 Oxford Library of the Fathers, S. Athanasius, Historical Tracts, 13, p. 3. 156 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION time until now, may not be lost in our days, and the trust which has been committed to us required at our hands, rouse yourselves, brethren, as being stewards of the mysteries of God, and seeing them now seized upon by aliens." Into, the Arian controversy, educationalists are not required to plunge ; it is sufficient to realise how stirring were the days in which S. Cyril had to play his part. The date of his ordination as a priest is not exactly known : he was admitted to Priest's Orders by Maximus, bishop of Jerusalem. Dr. Gifford (Introduction to S. Cyril's Catechetical Lectures, chap, ix. 1 ) adduces arguments to prove that the lectures were delivered in the season of Lent in the year 348 A.D. He further remarks : " It is expressly stated by Sozomen that ' the interval called Quadragesima' was made to consist of six weeks in Palestine, whereas it comprised seven weeks in Constantinople and the neighbour- ing provinces." The eighteen lectures which made up the course were preceded by a discourse called the Procate- chesis. This, it appears, was delivered at a public service, attended by a general congregation, to the catechumens, on the Sunday preceding the Fast. 1 Introduction, chap. ix. p. xlix. S. CYRIL OF JERUSALEM 157 S. Cyril refers more than once to the fact that the period of the Fast was forty days ; in all probability the first catechetical lecture was delivered on the opening day, the Monday, and the eighteenth on the night of Good Friday, the eve of the "Great Sabbath," the Saturday which represents the modem Easter Day. The opening sentence of the last lecture in this catechetical course strikes the Easter note : x " The root of all good works is the hope of the Resurrection." Again, in the " exhortation " at the end of the lecture, S. Cyril dwells on the immediate nearness of the crowning Festival in the Christian Calendar : 2 " And now, brethren beloved, the word of instruction exhorts you all to prepare your souls for the reception of the heavenly gifts. As regards the Holy and Apostolic Faith delivered to you to profess, we have spoken through the grace of the Lord as many Lectures as was possible in these fast days of Lent ; not that this is all we ought to have said, for many are the points omitted; and these perchance are thought out better by more excellent teachers. But now the holy day of the Passover is at hand, and ye, beloved in Christ, are to be enlightened by tlic Laver of Regeneration. . . . And after Easter's Holy Day of Salvation, ye shall come on each 1 Lecture XVIII. para. I. 3 Lecture XVIII. paru. 32. 158 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION successive day, beginning from the second day of the week, after the assembly into the Holy Place of the Resurrection" (i.e. the original "new tomb . . . hewn out in the rock," in which Joseph of Arimathaea had buried Christ), "and here, if God permits, ye shall hear other lectures, in which ye shall again be taught the reasons of everything which has been done." These lectures to the newly-baptized are extant : they are fjve in number. The first is upon the Christian mysteries, enforced by a consideration of the last seven verses of the fifth chapter of S. Peter's First Epistle. The second deals with baptism, the third with chrism, the fourth with the Body and Blood of Christ, the fifth and last with the Christian Liturgy, including the ritual of the Sacrament of the Eucharist. These last five lectures are valuable to the student of theology : Dr. Gifford calls them 1 "a most important record of the Sacramental Rites and Doctrines of the Eastern Church in the fourth Century, the most critical period of Ecclesiastical History." But to the student of education the first eighteen are the more valuable, being as they are to quote Dr. Gifford's words once more 2 " the first and only complete example of the course of instruction given 1 Introduction, chap. ix. 2 Ibid. S. CYRIL OF JERUSALEM 159 in the early centuries to Candidates seeking ad- mission to the fuller privileges of the Christian Church." Before considering these lectures, a short account of the Christian community in Jerusalem seems essential. All readers of the Acts of the Apostles will remember that at Jerusalem was settled that strife which arose between the Jewish Christians who maintained the necessity for retaining the Mosaic law with all its ceremonies, and those others who admitted non-Jewish converts to equality wilh themselves without imposing upon them the Mosaic rites. Though the fifteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles seems to represent S. Peter and Paul as fairly at one, yet the latter, 1 writing to the Galatian Christians, indicates that considerable dissension occurred before the community reached a solution. Neander refers to the efforts of S. Paul to establish and propagate 2 "the more expanded view of Christianity," and also to " the conciliating elements of the Apostle John's labours" after the death of S. Paul. Neander observes that this division lasted on, continuing among Jewish Christians in the second century, as is proved by 1 Gal. ii. 1 1 et seq. 2 General Church History, vol. ii. p. 10. 160 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho. (Chapters x., xi., xii. and xviii. of that Dialogue, as well as several more, testify to the existence of this schism in the middle and latter part of the second century.) Eusebius and Epiphanius describe, with varying detail, the withdrawal from Jerusalem of the members of the Christian community. Before the siege of the capital, they retired to the district S.-E. of the Sea of Galilee, known as Decapolis, having Pella for their centre. Neander regards the tradition that these self- exiled Jews returned later as probably true. He notes that in the reign of Hadrian this community, composed till now of Christians observing the Mosaic rites, suffered a change. That emperor, in consequence of insurrections in the city, turned all native Jews, 1 "who had not by their whole manner of life utterly renounced their nation," out of Jerusalem. Eusebius relates the results of this law : 2 " The city of the Jews being thus reduced to a state of abandonment for them, and totally stripped of its ancient inhabitants, and also inhabited by strangers ; the Roman city which subsequently arose, chang- ing its name, was called ^Elia, in honour of the 1 Neander, vol. ii. p. 12. - Ecdes. Hist. bk. iv. chap. vi. S. CYRIL OF JERUSALEM 161 Emperor ^Elius Adrian ; and when the Church was collected there of the Gentiles, the first bishop after those of the circumcision was Marcus." The closing lines show the changed nature of the new Church. Eusebius says the rebellion occurred in the eighteenth (and elsewhere he says the sixteenth) year of Hadrian, i.e. in 135 or 133 A.D. Neander, writing of this change, says : " If the story, already alluded to, concerning the return of the original community from Pella to Jerusalem is a correct one, or if a great majority of them at least did not remain behind at Pella, the event just mentioned would naturally lead those who held tenaciously to the Mosaic law, to separate themselves from the mixed community and repair once more to Pella, where a strictly Jewish Christian Church maintained its existence down to the fifth century." Dr. Bigg reminds us of the immense differences of race, class, and occupation which existed in the later years of the Empire : l " Historians, again, speak of Greco-Roman culture as if there was one definite thing answering to the name. But what we actually find is the most amazing disparity. Between the highest and the lowest of the subjects of Caesar there was no less difference than there is to-day between an Englishman and a Kaffir. Yet, 1 The Church's Task under the Empire, p. 2. II 162 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION further, men of every race, every colour, every degree of civilisation, dwelt not only within the same empire, but within the same walls. Barbarian, Scythian, bond and free, jostled one another in the streets of Rome. Great nobles, learned scholars, experienced men of affairs, admirable artists, skilful artisans, lived in the same city, under the same roof, with fierce and ignorant savages from the mountains of Morocco or the wilds of Britain." Dr. Bigg is writing of Rome ; but that which was true of the capital of the Empire applied in a mitigated degree to Jerusalem colonised under a Roman name. S. Jerome in his Lives of Illustrious Men throws no light on the composition of the Church at Jerusalem in the time of S. Cyril; but in his letter to S. Paulinus of Nola (written probably about 395 A.D.) he draws the following picture of Jerusalem : x " Men rush here from all quarters of the world; the city is filled with people of every race ; and so great is the throng of men and women, that there you will have to tolerate in its full dimensions an evil from which you desired to flee when you found it partially developed elsewhere." S. Cyril addressed his catechumens two hundred and ten years after Jerusalem became the Roman 1 The Epistles of Jerome, Iviii. S. CYRIL OF JERUSALEM 163 colony JSlia, and nearly fifty before the moment when Jerome wrote of its populous condition. We may gather, therefore, that the Church of his day lived in the midst of an infinitely various population. Early in the fifth century S. Jerome, writing Against Vigilantius, describes the poor of Jerusalem in words that contrast painfully with the Apostolic description of the primitive Church there, when the Christians had "all things in common 1 ": 1 "You, forsooth, were so generous to the whole community that if you had not come to Jerusalem and lavished your own money or that of your patrons, we should all be on the verge of starvation." S. Jerome seems to argue that the Apostolic custom of collecting through all the Churches for the poor of Jerusalem makes Vigilantius' claim false; but he does not deny the poverty of the faithful; he admits the necessity of alms "to support the weakness of the poor body, and to stave off cold and hunger.' 1 It was evidently, then, in a populous city, inhabited by men of many different races, that S. Cyril was called upon to work. The nature of the teaching which lie addressed to them may be gathered from his Catechetical Lectures. The Procatechesis, or Prologue to the lectures, is really full of indications of S. Cyril's teaching 1 Against Vigilantiits, p. 422, 164 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION method, consequently of hints to the teacher of to-day. Everyone who has ever taught in any real and continued fashion knows the difficulty of making the horse drink when he has been taken to the water, or the water has been brought to him. Because this difficulty is widespread, though not universal, a division has arisen between Teachers : some preferring the grimrose path of ease for their scholars, a path from which the solicitous and elaborately active teacher has eliminated every stone and every thorn, every roughness, every obstacle; others advocating the all - essentialness of the natural way, so that dangers and difficulties assail, and temptations allure the child, as they most certainly will beset him later, however indul- gent the years of infancy have been made. A few, like S. Cyril, take the v la media. The opening lines of his address to the audience of catechumens (an audience whose units were so different in race, capacity, and environment) strike a ringing note of encouragement. There is nothing dull, hard, tedious, repulsive in his invitation : it savours of hope, light, and warmth. Even in a translation these are not dissipated or lost : l " Already there is an odour of blessedness upon 1 Procatechesis, para. I, S. CYRIL OF JERUSALEM 165 you, O ye who are soon to be enlightened : already ye are gathering the spiritual flowers to weave heavenly crowns : already the fragrance of the Holy Spirit has breathed upon you : already ye have gathered round the vestibule of the King's palace." It is nothing to the purpose to argue that Cyril is speaking of religion, and the modern teacher is dealing most frequently with secular matters. What we have to learn is that good teaching hits, that bad teaching misses the mark. It is of no consequence that S. Cyril's target was of one colour, ours sometimes of another. The question of interest is, given the aim, does the method adopted achieve it? The catechumens gathered round Cyril to hear the new faith, not to listen to disquisitions on heathen authors, or to learn some new truth concerning art. That being so, the note of encouragement is exactly apt. They long to know, to feel, what other men and women whom they have met have obviously known and felt ; they are gathered here for that special pur- pose. It is not to be supposed that they were all equally eager, equally well informed, equally intelligent. Yet upon the ears of the most strenu- ous there, as upon the ears of him who had hardly been induced to attend, fell the words of satisfaction 166 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION or encouragement, as the case may be, "already" something is in your hands, " already " a part, if an infinitesimal part, of your object is attained. Every teacher knows the difficulty of holding back the over-eager, of spurring on the laggard at one and the same time and place. How exactly S. Cyril suited his words to his hearers : how tactfully he gets into touch with them at the first moment of encounter. Yet with that encouragement he at once blends warning, even in the first sentence, which is quoted above without its closing words " may ye be led in also by the King. 11 The second sentence mingles encouragement and warning just as the first does : already something is won, but the achievement of the whole may prove toilsome : l " For blossoms now have appeared upon the trees ; may the fruit also be found perfect." It is worth while to point out that S. Cyril is not only thinking of what might be called difficulties of the will and of feeling, but of those of the intellect too : he suggests the part that attention, memory, reasoning may be called upon to play : z " The honesty of purpose makes thee called : for if thy body be here but not thy mind, it profiteth thee nothing. 11 Later on in this discourse there is a much clearer call to effort : 3 " Beware lest thou 1 Para. I. 2 Para. i. 3 Para. 6. S. CYRIL OF JERUSALEM 167 have the title of jaiikful, but the will of the faithless. Thou hast entered into a contest, toil on through the race : another such opportunity thou canst not have." S. Cyril further warns his pupils against two dangers which beset learners : the first is the want of serious purpose ; the want of what an economist would call an effective demand. Most teachers have encountered those who desire the fruit of efforts, but will not spend the essential time and pains : it is one of the commonest experiences to hear someone say, " I wish I knew this or that," and then to see him show by lack of effort, by trifling, that the wish is not backed up by any serious purpose, is not, in fact, "effective." By an image of spiritual things S. Cyril shows us the possibility of ineffective demand which reigns everywhere, not less in things secular than in sacred : x " Even Simon Magus once came to the Laver: he was baptized, but was not enlightened ; and though he dipped the body in water, he enlightened not his heart with the Spirit." If any age ever needed this warning more than S. Cyril's did, perhaps our own does, this warning of the utter folly of desiring an end and refusing or neglecting the natural means to it. 1 Para. 2. 168 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION The second danger which he indicates is quite different : the desire is present, and the effort is put forth ; but the end is vanity, because the desire was tainted ; it is not a real thirst for knowledge, but idle curiosity : 1 " Let none of you enter saying, ' Let us see what the faithful are doing : let me go in and see, that I may learn what is being done. 111 A most interesting indication of general method occurs over and over again in this introduction to the Lectures. It is a commonplace of modern pedagogues that teaching should be exemplified and illustrated by constant appeals to things well within the learner's experience. It is hard to say when this dictate of wisdom dawned first on human intelligence. No reader of the Parables can doubt for a minute that the Teacher who was so great in Himself, so great in the matter of His instruc- tion, was hardly less so in His method. Perhaps S. Cyril learned to appeal constantly to the well- known in order to elucidate the unknown, from the example of the one great Master of the Chris- tians. Many instances occur in this introduction, consisting of seventeen short paragraphs. The season was Lent, the spring. S. Cyril opens with figures drawn from the new life ascending from the earth 1 Para. 2. S. CYRIL OF JERUSALEM 169 into the being of man, of the animals and birds and insects and plants : " already ye are gathering the spiritual flowers '" ; " blossoms now have appeared upon the trees. 1 " Again the new ceremonies about to be undergone must have engendered a feeling of strangeness in the minds of the catechumens, "blank misgivings of a Creature Moving about in worlds not realised." In a single sentence S. Cyril tries to prove to them that the new and the unknown will not be altogether alien to the old and the familiar. Again we must remember how mixed was his audience : the slave, may be, sat next to the soldier or to the young man of the world, and within touch of some public servant. Before the passage is quoted it should be said that at the beginning of Lent a public call was uttered, followed by the registration of the names of those who responded ; and that when the catechumens were first admitted they seem to have formed in procession, carrying tapers. S. Cyril's rendering of their new condition is calculated to appeal to all acquainted with domestic, military, or civil service, as also to the frequenter of ordinary society: "Thus far there has been an inscription of your names, and a call to service, and torches of the bridal train, and a longing for heavenly 170 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION citizenship. 1 ' How could he better have linked on the novel and untried to the life of everyday experience ? The passage quoted above : l " Thou hast entered into a contest, toil on through the race, 11 was calculated to reassure the athlete. The remark further on : 2 " Suppose thou hast gold un- wrought and alloyed, mixed with various sub- stances, copper and tin and iron and lead : we seek to have the gold alone ; can gold be purified from the foreign substances without fire ? " appeals to the experience of the smelter or refiner, who might quite well be listening as a catechumen. The possibility that there were such before S. Cyril is strengthened by his return to this image : 3 " Let your mind be refined as by fire into rever- ence : let your soul be forged as metal : let the stubboniness of unbelief be hammered out: let the superfluous scales of the iron drop off, and what is pure remain; let the rust of the iron be rubbed off, and the true metal remain." Another illustration is drawn from husbandry : * " Suppose aljs the season for planting trees : if we do not dig, and dig deep, where else can that be planted rightly which has once been planted ill?" 1 Para.. 6. 2 Para. 9. 3 Para. 15. 4 Para. II. S. CYRIL OF JERUSALEM 171 And then, in a final effort to impress upon his hearers the true nature of the work lying before them, he employs an illustration which would appeal to every one of his hearers, either as a designer, a maker of, or a dweller in a house: 1 "Suppose, pray, that the catechising is a kind of building: if we do not bind the house together by regular bonds in the building, lest some gap be found and the building become unsound, even our former labour is of no use. But stone must follow stone by course, and corner match with corner, and by our smoothing off inequalities the building must thus rise evenly. In like manner we are bringing to thee stones, as it were, of knowledge. Thou must hear concerning the living God; thou must hear of Judgment; must hear of Christ, and of the Resurrection. And many things there are to be discussed in succession, which though now dropped one by one are afterwards to be presented in harmonious connection. But unless thou fit them together in the one whole, and remember what is first and what is second, the builder may build, but thou wilt find the building unsound." If nothing remained to us of S. Cyril's lectures save the Procatecliesls, there would be sufficient 1 Para. u. 172 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION evidence to prove that he was a skilled and sympathetic teacher. How well he understood the lesson inculcated in the image of the wise builder, can be seen in his own orderly handling of his matter. The titles of his lectures indicate the methodical progress of thought. The necessity of securing the beginning- is a point on which all educational writers of eminence have laid stress; but the sequence which should follow the beginning has not been clearly explained and laid down perhaps before Herbart, who took up and elaborated Pestalozzi's tentative efforts after ordered progress. We cannot expect to find the famous " five steps " in Cyril's lectures ; yet they would require less ingenuity and special pleading than many other examples of teaching before they were tortured into a very passable example of Herbart's method. The following are the titles of the first five lectures : (1) To those who are to be enlightened : with a reading from Isa. i. 16. (2) On Repentance and Remission of sins, and concerning the Adversary. (3) On Baptism. (4) On the Ten points of Doctrine. (5) On Faith. S. CYRIL OF JERUSALEM 173 Now, the most casual reader can see that here there is a methodical sequence of thought. There is first of all the preparation of the pupils 1 minds for the new teaching. S. Cyril had grasped two elementary principles of teaching: the first is to make clear announcement about what is coming, the second is to hammer in the matter of the lesson by deliberate repetition. The announcement to those seeking baptism is clearly made: the words of the text at the head of the lecture strike the keynote of the discourse Wash you, make you clean. The catechumens, full of expectation, anxious for the setting forth of the new doctrine, are pulled up short with the information that some- thing is required of them, required at once, and of them all. Over and over again S. Cyril presses the lesson upon them, the lesson of effort, of purification, of self-discipline: 1 "Ye that are clothed with the rough garment of your offences . . . wash you, make you clean."" " If any here is a slave of sin, let him promptly prepare himself through faith for the new birth into freedom and adoption." 2 "The Lord in enlisting souls examines their 1 Lecture I. para. i. 8 Lecture I. para. 2. 174 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION purpose; and if any has a secret hypocrisy, He rejects the man as unfit for His service ; but if He finds one worthy, to him He readily gives His grace. 11 l "Blot out from thy mind all earthly care; for thou art running for thy soul. 11 2 "Wrestle for thine own soul, especially in such days as these. 1 ' 3 This whole first lecture is contained in six brief paragraphs. It is not too much to say that S Cyril has here presented a single theme so clearly, with such deliberate repetition and elabora- tion, that no hearer not extraordinarily deficient in intelligence could go away without having learnt the desired lesson. And that is the test of good teaching. It is of no consequence that the matter of lessons differs ; it does not signify what S. Cyril wished to teach. The question for the student of education is, did he teach it? was his method properly directed to achieve his aim ? The unbiassed reader can hardly answer except in the affirmative. So much, then, for the first lecture: the catechumens would go away with the impression that effort was required of them ; and they would 1 Lecture I. para. 3. 2 Lecture I. para. 5. 3 Lecture I. para. 6. S. CYRIL OF JERUSALEM 175 bring that notion back with them to the second lecture. S. Cyril seems to have felt that in the interim the question would have presented itself to them, " What is it against which this effort is to be directed?" and that question he sets himself to answer in the next lecture: the first discourse has been a deliberate preparation for the second. " A fearful thing is sin." Those are the opening words of the address. S. Cyril had evidently learned the wisdom of arresting the attention at the outset. A teacher who begins in a muddle, or wearies his pupil by a lengthy exordium with no apparent aim, will find it a difficult task later in the lesson to galvanise the blunted, numbed faculties into new life. So this skilled teacher answers the question which should be stirring in the minds of those before him with a startling statement 1 "A fearful thing is sin." It is against this fearful thing that the effort is to be made. But S. Cyril is not sensational : he announces at once that it is 2 "a fearful evil, but not incurable." He proceeds to analyse its nature, its origin : 3 " It is not an enemy, O man, that assails thee from without, but an evil shoot growing 1 Lecture II. para. I. 2 Lecture II. para. I. 3 Lecture II. para. 2. 176 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION up out of thyself." " Yet thou art not the sole author of the evil; but there is also another most wicked prompter, the devil." l Then he announces the remedy, confession of sin, that God may grant forgiveness. The wealth of illustration, the multiplication of examples of those who having confessed had received forgiveness, is another instance of the excellence of S. Cyril's teaching. He is never "in the air"; he repeatedly brings his catechumens back to illustrative facts, known and read of all men. Lecture III., On Baptism, is a continuation of the subject introduced at the end of the previous discourse. How is remission of sins to be obtained ? was the question left to arise in the catechumens 1 mind after S. Cyril's elaborate description of the sinful state. By baptism, is the answer in the third lecture. But the Father elaborates his teaching. The catechumens are not to look upon baptismal lustration as a kind of magical charm. S. Cyril hints that the washed soul is in no condition of permanent safety, the struggle will begin again, and can be carried on successfully only by means of the baptismal mystical (not magical) " grace " ; 1 Lecture II. para. 3. S. CYRIL OF JERUSALEM 177 " When thou hast been deemed worthy of the grace, He then giveth thee strength to wrestle against the adverse powers. For as after His baptism He was tempted forty days, ... so thou likewise though not daring before thy baptism to wrestle with the adversaries, yet after thou hast received the grace, and art henceforth confident in the armour of righteousness, must then do battle and preach the gospel if thou wilt." Briefly to recapitulate, these first three lectures >lio\\e 1 Decline and Fall, chap. xxii. 2 Orat. 4. ATTITUDE TO ROMAN LEARNING 223 But though the Christians were bitterly opposed to Julian's law, yet their approbation of the attend- ance of Christian children in schools where paganism lingered was by no means universal. S. Chrysostom, for example, gives somewhat halting permission. He is weighing the relative advantages of the public and the monastic school : " If you have masters among you who can answer for the virtue of your children, I should be very far from advocating your sending them to a monastery ; on the contrary, I should strongly insist on their remaining where they are. But if no one can give such a guarantee, we ought not to send children to schools where they will learn vice before they learn science, and where, in acquiring learning of relatively small value, they will lose what is far more precious, their integrity of soul . . . the choice lies between two alternatives : a liberal education, which you may get by sending your children to the public schools ; or the salvation of their souls, which you secure by sending them to the monks. Which is to gain the day, science or the soul ? If you can unite both advantages, do so by all means ; but, if not, choose the most precious. 11 S. Chrysostom seems, when these words are read casually, to imply that it was not possible to secure a liberal education for children if they were 224 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION sent into monastic schools. Though, speaking generally, this may have been true enough in his time, circumstances developed monastic learning in succeeding centuries. Under the Roman Empire, three kinds of schools existed : the imperial or municipal public schools, the episcopal or cathedral schools, and the monastic schools. The second of these arose out of the practice of the earliest bishops of the Church, whose habit it was to use their own houses as training grounds for priests. During the first three Christian centuries these episcopal houses tended to develop gradually into cathedral schools. Cardinal Newman writes as follows : l " Scarcely had the new dispensation opened when, following the example of the schools of the Temple and of the Prophets under the old, S. John is recorded, over and above the public assemblies of the faithful, to have had about him a number of students whom he familiarly instructed ; and as time went on and power was given to the Church, this school for ecclesiastical learning was placed under the roof of the bishop.' 1 Newman goes on to describe the seminary attached to the Lateran Church, the Pope's " first cathedral." ; The most interesting of his remarks to the student ~PT of education is this : 2 " Strict as a monastic novi- 1 Historical Sketches, vol. i. p. 241. 2 Ibid. ATTITUDE TO ROMAN LEARNING 225 tiate, it nevertheless included polite literature in its course; and a library was attached to it for the use of the seminarists." When the barbarians swept over the Roman Empire in the fifth century, the Imperial schools, their allies the municipal schools and the episcopal schools, suffered almost total annihilation. The precise date of their destruction is not known definitely ; it is thought to be not later than the seventh century. Even so, we are not to think that no layman taught anywhere, only that the system was swept away. Ozonam writes : l " In , * / Italy, till the eleventh century, lay teachers pur- 1 sued their course side by side with the ecclesiastical | schools, as if to unite the end of the old Imperial! I j system to the origin of that of the Universities." The episcopal schools fared as badly, apparently, as the Imperial. Probably they were more con- spicuous than the monastic schools. Of these latter, too, some were destroyed, and the rest, living in fear of attack, had not a little difficulty to pre- serve learning. It is generally admitted that the practice of monasticism was of Oriental origin ; it is certainly older than Christianity. Before Christians adopted the monastic or ccenobitic life, in the fulness of 1 Civilisation in Fifth Century, vol. i. p. 195. '5 226 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION that system as we understand it, there were to be found among them anchorites, " withdrawals," men who lived solitary lives of piety and renunciation. After the establishment of monasteries, men, drawn and impelled to the lonely life, continued in that state. It should be noticed, however, that so far as Christianity is concerned, John Cassian seems to claim priority for the coenobites. He is quoting the words of Abbot Piamun, and he says: 1 "So the system of the coenobites took its rise in the days of the preaching of the Apostles. For such was all that multitude ot believers in Jerusalem, which is thus described in the Acts of the Apostles." After quoting Acts iv. ^32, ii. 45, iv. 34, 35, Cassian adds : " The whole Church, I say, was then such as now are those few who can be found with difficulty in coenobia." He goes on to say that with the spread of the faith, the first rigour of Christian renunciation was somewhat relaxed, and then those who " maintained the fervour of the Apostles began to live in rural and more sequestered spots, and there, in private and on their own account, to practise those things which they had learnt to have been ordered by the Apostles throughout the whole body of the Church in general ; and so that whole system of which we have spoken grew up." 1 Conferences, pt. in. chap. v. ATTITUDE TO ROMAN LEARNING 227 It is obvious that the later of these communities more closely resembled what we are accustomed to think of as monasteries. We should infer from S. Gregory's Panegyric on S. Basil that some rivalry existed between the crenobites and the anchorites. He writes: ( 62) " Moreover he " (i.e. Basil) " reconciled most excel- lently, and united the solitary and the community life. These had been in [many respects at variance and dissension, while neither of them was in absolute and unalloyed possession of good or evil : the one being more calm and settled, tending to union with God, yet not free from pride, inasmuch as its virtue lies beyond the means of testing or comparison ; the other, which is of more practical service, being not free from the tendency to turbulence. He founded cells for ascetics and hermits, but at no great distance from his crenobitic communities ; and instead of distinguishing and separating the one from the other, as if by some intervening wall, he brought them together and united them, in order that the contemplative spirit might not be cut off from society, nor the active life be uninfluenced by the contemplative, but that, like sea and land, by an interchange of their several gifts, they might unite in promoting the one object, the glory of God." 228 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION Readers of Jerome's Lives of' Illustrious Men will notice that the chapters begin with a proper name, followed generally by a descriptive title, e.g. " John the Apostle " ; " Ignatius, third bishop of the Church of Antioch " ; " Agrippa, a man of great learning " ; "Tertullian the presbyter," and so forth. It is not till the eighty-eighth chapter that after the proper name comes the monastic title ; in that we read of " Anthony the monk."" This man was born in 251, and lived to a great age, dying in 356. A life of S. Antony is attributed to S. Athanasius. Some critics have doubted its genuineness, but the translators of the Orations of S. Gregory Nazianzen, in the Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, following Cardinal Newman, pronounce it genuine. S. Antony, who by the way appears to have been opposed from his youth up to secular learning, gained followers in the devout life, and many monastic communities were founded in Egypt, and specially in the country about Thebes. Gennadius, however, attributes the foundation of the Egyptian monasteries to S. Pachomius, who was born towards the close of the third century, and died in 348. Among this monk's disciples and followers, also mentioned by Gennadius, were Theodoras (314-367), the successor of Pachomius; Oresiesis, "a man learned to perfection in Scrip- ATTITUDE TO ROMAN LEARNING 229 ture " ; " Macarius . . . distinguished for his miracles and virtues " ; and Evagrius, of whom the historian of education is glad to learn that he was " educated in sacred and profane literature and distinguished, whom the book which is called The Lives of the Fathers mentions as a most continent and erudite man."" 1 Among ninety-nine names, mostly those of bishops, only those of five monks find a place in Gennadius' Addendum to Jerome's Lives of Illustrious Men. Among S. Jerome's treatises is one entitled, Tlie Life of Paulits, the First Hermit. In the opening lines he discusses the question, " What monk was the first to give a signal example of the hermit life ? " This distinction, commonly given, as he says, to S. Antony, he claims for Paul of Thebes. He does not suggest, however, that Paul was anything but a "solitary. 1 " In his letters, S. Jerome seems to imply the superiority of monastic over the solitary life. He relates the circumstances by which the head of an Egyptian monastery led a young Greek to conquer temptation ; and he adds : " Had he been a solitary hermit, by whose aid could he have overcome the temptations that assailed him ? " 2 Lake Natron lies about midway between Alex- 1 Gennadius, chap. xi. - To Rusticus, a monk of Toulouse, 411 A.u. 230 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION andria and Memphis ; the valley in which it is situated is overshadowed by the Nitrian mountain. When S. Jerome visited Egypt a great church had been built on the top of this mountain, and climbing up the mountain sides, clustering round the church, were no less than fifty monasteries. Each of these institutions was ruled over by its own superior ; but the "rule" to which all submitted was, as Cassian tells us, identical ; l over the superiors was an abbot, and the whole community recognised the Bishop of Heliopolis as their diocesan. It was in the year 385 that S. Jerome paid this famous visit ; the progress which had been made in about fifty years was therefore remarkable. S. Gregory Nazianzen tells us that the great Athanasius retired "to the holy and divine homes of contemplation in Egypt, 11 I.e. to the monasteries in the Thebaid. In his Panegyric on S. Basil, S. Gregory relates that Basil founded a monastery " worthy of mention." As a matter of fact, he founded a number of monas- teries in Pontus, in the N.-E. of Asia Minor. By the fourth century the Churches of this part of the world had lost their pristine virtues and order ; S. Basil laboured unceasingly to restore their candle- stick to its place, and Newman claims that "his 1 Institutes, bk. II. chap. iii. ATTITUDE TO ROMAN LEARNING 231 monasteries became, in a short time, schools of that holy teaching which had been almost banished from the sees of Asia."" From the works of S. Jerome we can learn that the monastic principle spread quickly in the fourth century. In one of his letters, writing of Marcella, a Roman matron, he observes, " In those days " (i.e. 382 A.D.) "no highborn lady at Rome had made profession of the monastic life ... or had ventured . . . publicly to call herself a nun." 1 This seems to imply the existence of monasteries at Rome ; it is believed that thejfirst monastery was Jounded there in 340 A.D. In his Life of S. Hilarion, written in 390 A.D., Jerome writes : " Following his example, however, innumerable monasteries sprang up throughout the whole of Palestine, and all the monks flocked to him."" Seven years later, writing to Pammachius (a Roman senator who had become a monk) to warn him not to be unduly proud of his own humility in taking such a step, Jerome says : " I, for my part, am building in this province a monastery and a hospice close by ; so that if Joseph and Mary chance to come to Bethlehem, they may not fail to find shelter and welcome. Indeed, the number of monks who flock here from all quarters of 1 Letters, CXXVIII. 232 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION the world is so overwhelming that I can neither desist from my enterprise nor bear so great a burthen. 11 To the spread of monasteries in particular, and of Christianity in general, he refers incidentally in his letter to Laeta: "From India, from Persia, from Ethiopia we daily welcome monks in crowds. The Armenian bowman has laid aside his quiver, the Huns learn the Psalter, the chilly Scythians are warmed with the glow of the faith. The Getoc, ruddy and yellow-haired, carry tent-churches about with their armies, and perhaps their success in fighting against us may be due to the fact that they believe in the same religion."" And once more in a letter, bearing the date of 406 A.D., he writes : " You already build monasteries, and support in the various islands a large number of holy men. 111 S. Athanasius is thought to have introduced monastic principles into Gaul; a monastery was founded in Trier in 336. This was followed in time by others founded by S. Martin of Tours, one at Ligug^ in 360, another at Marmoutiers in 372 ; S. Honoratus founded the monastery of Lerins near Cannes in 405 ; while John Cassian founded that of S. Victor at Marseilles. Sulpitius Severus, in chapter viii. of his Dialogues, 1 Epistle CXVIII. ATTITUDE TO ROMAN LEARNING 233 mentions that travelling to Bethlehem he met S. Jerome, whom he describes as a man learned not only " in Latin and Greek, but also Hebrew to such a degree that no one dare venture to com- pare himself with him in all knowledge." But even so excellent a person had enemies, and the " Gallic friend " with whom Sulpitius is carrying on these dialogues remarks of S. Jerome, that "some five years ago I read a certain book of his in which the whole tribe of our monks is most vehemently assaulted and reviled by him."" The Gaul, though he admits that this has annoyed others, pardons Jerome, remarking with admirable moderation that he is of opinion that Jerome had " made the remark rather about Eastern than about Western monks. 11 However this may be, the reorganisation of Gallic monasteries is attributed to the wisdom and capacity of Cassian, who, during his long sojourn in Egypt, had studied Christian monasteries in their ancient home. Under the guidance of Eusebius, bishop of Vercelli, monasteries were multiplied throughout Italy. The most famous of them all, the Bene- dictine monastery of Monte Cassino, founded in _529, lies outside the scope of this book. A study of S. Benedict's " rule " will convince anyone that 234 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION his method allowed and encouraged all his monks to pursue learning. It is obvious that the primary intention of those who founded and fostered monas- teries was, in the words of S. Gregory Nazianzen, quoted above, to promote "the one object, the glory of God. 1 ' They were not, in their inception, schools of learning. But they endured when the Imperial, municipal and cathedral schools perished. Gradually the pursuit of learning gained something like equality with the pursuit of holiness ; and it is on this account that it seemed impossible to omit monasticism in a study of the Christian attitude to education. We are, many of us, too accustomed to judge it by its later exhibition of itself in decay ; but a study of it in its beginning and in its prime will surely bring us nearer to Dr. Sandys 1 view, when he writes that Cassian in his sequel to his Institutes is " dwelling on the ideal of the monastic life, and thus supplying that incentive towards intellectual studies which led to the monasteries' of the West becoming the homes of learning and literature, and even of classical scholarship, in the! Middle Ages. 111 Of all the monasteries of which! that was essentially true, the most distinguished is .that of Monte Cassino. As the "rule 11 of S. Benedict was largely indebted to the account 1 A History of Classical Scholarship, vol. i. pp. 207, 208. ATTITUDE TO ROMAN LEARNING 235 which John Cassian had left in his Conferences of the Egyptian monasteries, it is not an unfruitful task for the student of education to search in Cassian for "that incentive towards intellectual studies" of which Dr. Sandys speaks. We must not expect to find eulogies on learning, or definite curricula of instruction ; but we can find the work of preparation, the work of weaning humanity from what is worthless, the drawing of the will towards effort and renunciation, a stimulus inciting men "To scorn delights, and live laborious days"; and all these things are parts of education, the necessary preparation for and concomitants of instruction and the pursuit of learning. The blossom and fruit are to be sought in the later years, which lie outside the limits of this book ; Cassian relates the share of those who are sowers of the harvest which others reap, a harvest not always accurately foreseen. The exposition of Abbot Moses (given by Cassian) of the " end or aim " of a monk, shows clearly that in the beginning of things learn- ing qua learning was not included in it : " The end of our profession ... is the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven ; but the immediate aim or goal is purity of heart. 11 1 1 Conferences, pt. I. chap. iv. 236 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION It is not difficult to see even so, taking the aim of monasticism as just that and no more, that the system might, almost must, have an educational effect. The age in which Christian monasticism established itself and spread was that of the dis- ruption of the Roman Empire, of an empire which had strayed away from its old strenuous ideals, and had abandoned itself to physical indulgence, to pomp, idleness, corruption, and vice of many other kinds. Any system, therefore, whose aim was purity of heart, must tend to keep alive the smouldering embers of the old vanishing aims. No doubt the barbarians who swarmed down upon the emasculated Romans possessed many virtues of the rougher kinds. It was not to them, how- ever, for many a long day, that the world could look for any kind of education except that crudest variety, tending to self-preservation, which even savages enjoy. But these monastic com- munities, spreading more and more, kept alive, in the hearts of the comparatively few no doubt, a regard for the virtue which Rome's fall was imperilling, purity of heart. Moreover, the monastic rule preserved the belief expressed by Erasmus in a humanistic phrase "The gods sell us all things for labour." Along no primrose path of ease did Cassian invite the intending monk to ATTITUDE TO ROMAN LEARNING 237 walk : " Our profession has its own goal and end, for which we undergo all sorts of toils, not merely without weariness, but actually with delight/ 11 Readers of Montaigne's Essays will remember how he insists on the truth that " the mind which has no fixed aim comes to ruin. 11 In the catalogue of his library the Fathers do not figure; but the following sentence from Abbot Moses is simply an elaborated form of the aphorism quoted above : " The first thing, as I said, in all the arts and sciences is to have some goal, I.e. a mark for the mind, and constant mental purpose ; for unless a man keeps this before him with all diligence and persistence, he will never succeed in arriving at the ultimate aim and the gain which he desires." The opening words of Abbot Piamun's Conference enforce the same principle with more elaboration of detail : ~ " Whatever man, my children, is desirous to attain skill in any art, unless he gives himself up with the utmost pains and carefulness to the study of that system which he is anxious to learn, and observes the rules and orders of the best masters of that work or science, is indulging in a vain hope to reach by idle wishes any similarity 1 Conferences, pt. I. chap. ii. 2 Ibid. pt. III. chap. ii. 238 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION to those whose pains and diligence he avoids copy- ing. . . . Wherefore you should first hear how or whence the system and beginning of our order took its rise. For only then can a man at all effectually be trained in any art he may wish, and be urged on to practise it diligently when he has learnt the glory of its authors and founders." A close ally of strenuous effort and persistent labour is the practice of obedience, constantly enforced upon the monks. 1 Cassian is considering the best way of training, and he recommends re- nunciation of riches, the practice of obedience, and a habit of work and toil. 2 In Book IV. of the Institutes, Cassian insists again and again on the necessity for obedience. But perhaps the greatest service which monasteries performed for the future work of education was its condemnation of laziness, of lack of occupation. S. Benedict's aphorism, "Idleness is an enemy of the soul," is surely one of those mottoes which the great Erasmus would not have disdained to inscribe, with an ethical purpose, on some article of common use : " I have known a proverb inscribed upon a ring or a cup, sentences worth remembering painted on a door or a window." 3 Yet S. Jerome and S. John 1 Conferences, pt. III. chap. iv. 2 Institutes, bk. II. chap. iii. 3 De Ratione Studii, 4. ATTITUDE TO ROMAN LEARNING 239 Cassian were before the wise Benedict in their insistence upon the moral fault of idleness. *' Always have some work on hand, that the devil may find you busy. . . . Make creels of reeds, or weave baskets out of pliant osiers. Hoe your ground ; mark out your garden into even plots. . . . Construct also hives for bees . . . and you may learn from the tiny creatures how to order a monastery and to discipline a kingdom. Twist lines, too, for catching fish, and copy books ; that your hand may earn your food, and your mind may be satisfied with reading." 1 This closing sentence should be noticed. The directors of jnpnasteries found very soon that mere manual labour will not occupy the mind ; and the reading of books, recommended by S. Jerome, became a duty enjoined by the Benedictine "rule," and this gradually led to the preservation of the works , of the greater Fathers and of the more distinguished of Greek and Latin pagan authors. Had it not been for the reading, first commanded in monasteries \ _as a protection against idleness, no one can tell how many more gaps we might have to deplore in the works of the " divine men of old time." " In Egypt," S. Jerome adds, " the monasteries make it a rule to receive none who are not willing 1 Jerome to Rusticus, a young monk of Toulouse. 240 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION to work ; for they regard labour as necessary, not only for the support of the body, but also for the salvation of the soul." It is in the tenth book of his Institutes, in that interesting treatise upon the sin of accidie and the methods of overcoming it, that Cassian writes most forcibly on the avoidance of laziness. "Those who will not work are always restless, owing to the fault of idleness." 1 "And so taught by these examples, the Fathers in Egypt never allow monks, and especially the younger ones, to be idle, estimating the purpose of their hearts and their growth in patience and humility by their diligence in work." 5 " Whence this saying has been handed down from the old Fathers in Egypt : that a monk who works is attacked by one devil, but an idler is tormented by countless spirits." 3 Closely allied with these admonitions concerning idleness, are the arrangements which were made for reading at meals : " We have been informed that the plan, that while the brethren are eating, the holy lessons should be read in the coenobia, did not originate in the Egyptian system, but in the Cappadocian. And there is no doubt that 1 Institutes, bk. X. chap. viii. 2 Ibid. bk. X. chap. xxii. 3 Ibid. bk. X. chap, xxiii. ATTITUDE TO ROMAN LEARNING 241 they want to establish it not so much for the sake of the spiritual exercise as for the sake of putting a stop to unnecessary and idle conversation, and especially discussions, which so often arise at meals." * The definite end, clearly kept in view : the necessity for continued effort if skill is to be attained ; the practice of obedience, the saving efficacy of occupation, all these points, dwelt on with elaboration over and over again, by Cassian, are the educational side of monasticism in primitive times. It is to be feared that they play too in- conspicuous a part now in our modern schemes for the welfare of education. This chapter has already stretched itself out to inordinate length, but it cannot be closed without some reference to S. Augustine's view of education and pagan learning. He is generally quoted in support of the con- tentions of Symonds and Compayre, and, as everyone knows, certain passages in his Coiifesslons are hostile to classical learning. It is indeed with something like regret that we find him, who as a boy could " weep the death of Dido which came of her love to ^Eneas," who could tell us that when he was a youth the Scriptures 1 Institutes, bk. IV. chap. xvii. 16 242 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION seemed to him " undignified in comparison with Ciceronian dignity," losing his critical balance in later life till he felt compelled to renounce all pagan writings. But it is less generally remembered that when Evodius asked S. Augustine who were the " spirits in prison" to whom Christ preached, he replied that he would fain believe they were the spirits of the great classical writers whose works he had studied in the schools, and whose eloquence he still admired. Further, M. Boissier asserts that if he quotes the classics less often than S. Jerome, he remembers them very often, and always with increasing affection, as the end of life grows nearer. Perhaps one final quotation from Dr. Sandys 1 History of Classical Learning may be made, to instance one more primitive Christian who managed to combine the new faith with a scholar's zeal. He is writing of Theodore of Mopsuestia (c. 350-428), and says he "is highly esteemed as a biblical expositor and a theological controversialist. His opposition to the allegorical method of interpretation is noticed by Photius. He prefers the grammatical and historical method which he had inherited from Chrysostom's master and his own, Diodorus of Antioch, and in the ATTITUDE TO ROMAN LEARNING 243 exegesis of the New Testament he shows the instincts of a scholar in noticing minor words which are often overlooked, in attending to niceties of grammar and punctuation, and in keenly discussing doubtful readings." Hardly less interesting to the student of education than any of the foregoing is S. Paulinus of Nola, born in the city of Bordeaux in 353. He was the pupil of Ausonius, a professing Christian at any rate, who taught grammar and rhetoric in Bordeaux, until, in 364*, he became the tutor of Gratian, the heir to the Imperial throne. No space remains here to deal with S. Paulinos; but the student may be directed to the account of him given by M. Boissier in the second volume of La Fin du Paganisme. Nor should the quaint and beautiful life of him written by our own too-little-read poet, Henry Vaughan, be forgotten ; who in a burst of enthusiasm declares that he lived "in a golden age, when religion and learning kissed each other and equally flourished. So that he had the happiness to shine in an age that loved light, and to multiply his own by the light of others."" We may close this account of the attitude of the primitive Christians to learning by quotations 244 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION from earlier critics than Symonds, Compayre, and Hallam, earlier, indeed, but perhaps at least equally well read. Writing to Ladislas, King of Bohemia and Hungary, ^Eneas Sylvius, afterwards Pope Pius n., observes : " As Basil allows, the poets and other authors of antiquity are saturated with the same faith, and for this reason deserve our study. . . . You will have no difficulty in quoting classical precedent for honouring them (i.e. the classic writers) as they deserve. Nay, the Fathers them- selves, Jerome, Augustine, and Cyprian, did not hesitate to draw illustrations from heathen poetry, and so sanctioned its study." Milton in the A reopagitica writes : "The question was . . . controverted among the primitive doctors, but with great odds on that side which affirmed it both lawful and profitable; as was then evi- dently perceived when Julian the Apostate and subtlest enemy to our faith made a decree forbidding Christians the study of heathen learn- ing; for, said he, they wound us with our own weapons, and with our own arts and sciences they overcome us." In dealing with this question of the relation of the Fathers to learning, there is one con- sideration, not yet mentioned which should not ATTITUDE TO ROMAN LEARNING 245 be forgotten. Our own age differs in some respects materially from the first five centuries ; as generation succeeds generation, the tide of speculation increases ; some words and phrases change their meaning; definitions alter, and points of view shift. To us, spectators of, if not sharers in, so many varied lines of thought, the problem of the relation between so-called secular and divine philosophy cannot be embodied in phrases so clear cut, so mutually exclusive, as those of an age when, as Symonds puts it, "the creeds had to be defined"; consequently we may sometimes mistake for intolerance what was really a necessity of the age. CHAPTER VIII. S. JEROME. OF the early Fathers, the most learned were probably S. Clement of Alexandria, S. Origen, and S. Jerome. The erudition of the first of these is not exhibited in the Pedagogue so often or so clearly as it is in the Exhortation to the Heathen, and in the Stromata or Tapestry Work. It is perhaps natural that in order to win the heathen, S. Clement should have been at pains to prove that he was thoroughly acquainted with their greatest writers, appreciative even of their literature, since the best way of winning men to something esteemed higher is to value highly that which they already have. No man gains his opponent by underrating his position. When in his opening pages he tells the story of the Pythic Grasshopper, he shows himself as a literary man ; his ability does not evaporate wholly even in translation, as he tells us that " Eunomos was S. JEROME 247 playing the lyre in the summer time ; it was when the grasshoppers, warmed by the sun, were chirp- ing beneath the leaves." All through this exhorta- tion, though his purpose is to wean the Pagans from mythology, his knowledge of classical literature is intimate and extensive. Dr. Kaye remarks of it : " The work bespeaks a familial- acquaintance with the Scriptures and with profane literature," interesting testimony that the con- junction of the two was possible and actual. It is a different matter when we come to the Stromata, a treatise not addressed to the heathen, but designed to be a treasure-house of traditional wisdom, a tower of strength against the increasing Gnostic heresy. "This work of mine," he writes, "... is not artfully constructed for display, 1 but my memoranda are stored up against old age, as a remedy against forgetfulness, truly an image and outline of those vigorous and animated discourses which I was privileged to hear, and of blessed and truly remarkable men." These were certainly Pantaenus, and possibly Tatian and Theodotus, of whom S. Clement further remarks that they had preserved "the tradition of the blessed doctrine derived directly from the holy Apostles." 1 Stromata, bk, I. 248 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION More than once he dwells on the fact that his aim is "a preservation of the truth"; 1 and he explicitly says that he will not eschew classical literature : " Let a man milk the sheep's milk if he need sustenance : let him shear the wool if he need clothing. And in this way let me produce the fruit of Greek erudition." And again he writes : " Like farmers who irrigate the land beforehand, so we also water with the liquid stream of Greek learning what in it is earthy." And once more : " The Stromata will contain the truth mixed up in dogmas of philosophy or rather covered over and hidden, as the edible part of the nut in the shell." It is not only for illustration and exposition that S. Clement draws from the classics : he definitely proclaims the lawfulness of mundane wisdom. Human arts, he declares, come from God as really as the revelation of divine truth : moreover he remembered, what some thinkers have forgotten with deplorable results, that philosophy is the handmaid of theology. He devotes a whole chapter to the benefit of culture, and he commits himself to the following statement, which is a hard nut, for those who maintain the carelessness of the Christians about learning, to crack : " A Stromata, bk. I. S. JEROME 249 we say that a man can be a believer without learning, so also we assert that it is impossible for a man without learning to comprehend the things which are declared in the faith." 1 He elaborates this idea of the essentialness to en- lightened faith of knowledge in a subsequent chapter when he says : 2 " Some who think them- selves naturally gifted do not wish to touch either philosophy or logic ; nay more, they do not wish to learn natural science. They demand bare faith alone, as if they wished, without bestowing any care on the vine, straightway to gather clusters from the first." It may be an interesting proof of S. Clement's broadmindedness that he cared to maintain that every kind of philosophy " contai some germ of truth " ; though in endeavouring to explain Christ's words, " All that came before Me were thieves and robbers," he admits that perhaps the devil stole philosophy ; but he argues that the " Lord did not prevent him," and, further, that this "gift was not hurtful." 3 It was even bene- ficial : " There is thus in philosophy, though stolen as the fire by Prometheus, a slender spark, capable of being fanned into flame, a trace of wisdom, and an impulse from God." These, certainly, are not the words of a man 1 Book I. chap. vi. 2 Book I. chap. ix. 3 Book I. chap. xvii. 250 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION who undervalued knowledge, or prohibited its acquisition. Like Tertullian later on, S. Clement maintains that the Greek philosophers borrowed from the Hebrew Scriptures ; but that is rather a defence of than an attack on Greek learning. 1 It is impossible, owing to lack of space, to indicate even briefly the vast erudition of this early Father as it is shown in the Stromata. But enough has been said here (and in an earlier chapter of his Pcedagogue) to prove that he was a staunch supporter of learning and education. At least one hundred and fifty years separate the period of his greatest activity from that which saw S. Jerome's work. Moreover, Clement was a Greek Father, living for the most part in Alexandria, belonging always to the Eastern Church; S. Jerome was a Latin, born near one of the greatest cities in Italy. He was indeed the first Latin Churchman greatly distinguished for learning. The beginnings of the Christian Church were committed to the hands of the Greeks : Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch, Con- stantinople, all these great Eastern dioceses and the country under their rule had produced learned thinkers and teachers in the early centuries. Rome, it should also be remembered, was not celebrated 1 Book II. chap. v. S. JEROME 251 for the learning of its leaders so soon as the Church of North- West or Pro-consular Africa was ; Tertullian, and Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, both belonged to the African Church as distinguished from that of Rome ; while the other early Latin Father who attracted notice by his learning, S. Irenaeus, ruled the Church of Lyons. It was not indeed till the time of Jerome that the See of Rome became powerful ; he and it sprang into notice it might almost be said together, for he was made secretary of that Council which was called at Rome in 382 A.D. as a rival to the Council of Constantinople of the previous year. Clement of Alexandria, the learned Greek Father, wrote the Stromata to preserve Apostolic teaching. Jerome, the learned Latin, found his lines cast in the days when the Church was distracted by the claims of rival bishops to the same sees, and rent by heresies and schisms. When he sat in the Roman Council as its secretary, he witnessed the strife between representatives of the Apollinarian heresy based in its beginning on Plato^s psychology and Epiphanius, the learned Bishop of Salamina in Cyprus. This man was profoundly learned in the heresies of the Church ; Jerome tells us " he wrote books Against all Heresies."" l He routed 1 Lives of Illustrious Men, chap. cxiv. 252 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION the Eastern bishops, exposed their fallacies, and refuted their conclusions. At last, worsted in argument, the Apollinarians agreed to sign a document, which Jerome was required to draw up, embodying the orthodox doctrine of the Church. Though S. Jerome was afterwards accused by the Apollinarians of altering the document when they had signed it, and though this Council of Rome failed of its purpose in superseding the Council of Constantinople, yet the Bishop of Rome, Damasus, had learned to appreciate the rare abilities and learning of Jerome, who by this time had travelled extensively, and was acquainted with the Churches of Rome, Antioch, and Constantinople, as well as with the monastic retreats of the desert of Chalcis in Syria. Damasus offered him the Secretaryship of the Roman See ; and Jerome remained in that position for three years, till 385, when he resigned his post in order to found that monastery at Bethlehem of which he writes in the letter to Pammachius, quoted in the previous chapter. If Rome had not yet produced a Christian scholar of notable learning, Jerome, at any rate, found some of the raw materials of erudition there, notably the library which Damasus had built, near to Pompey's Theatre, to receive the archives of the Latin Church. S. JEROME 253 It is not in the least surprising that the Bishop of Rome should have desired to enlist S. Jerome in the band of Roman Christians ; for his learning and his varied experiences marked him out from the common run of men. As a youth he had been a pupil of ^Elius Donatus, whom Dr. Sandys suspects to have been "deficient in knowledge and judgment, and far too fond of allegorising inter- pretations," but who nevertheless was famous as a teacher at the end of the fourth century, and who wrote a grammar which, either in its original condition or as the basis of later grammars, maintained a position in the mediaeval schools, and even lingered on to modern times. Readers of Rabelais will remember that Master Tubal Holofernes made Gargantua study " Donatus 1 Latin Grammar."" While at Rome, Jerome became ac- quainted with the works of the Greek philosophers, and as we learn from the twenty-second Letter, addressed to Eustochium, he was at great pains to collect a library : " When I was on my way to Jerusalem to wage my warfare, I still could not bring myself to forego the library which I had formed for myself at Rome. 1 ' 1 The curriculum of the Roman schools of the fourth century closely resembled Quintilian's scheme 1 Letter XXII. 30. 254 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION for the education of an orator; Jerome attained celebrity on account both of his erudition and eloquence. During his sojourn in Trier he turned his attention to theology. When he returned to Aquileia, he embraced the ascetic life, and in the year 374 he retired to the desert of Chalcis after a period of doubt concerning his future life, as we gather from a letter, bearing the date 374, to Theodosius, a Syrian anchorite. It is well known that Jerome was the favourite Father of the great Erasmus. Readers of their letters cannot but be struck by a tie between them which appears in one of the letters written from Antioch, where S. Jerome says : 1 " My poor body, weak even when well, has been shattered by frequent illnesses. 1 ' Erasmus who once wrote : " My constitution, even when at its best, cannot bear vigils or fastings or any discomforts. I fall ill from time to time even here, where I live so luxuriously, what should I do among the hardships of conventual life?" : could, if anyone were able, sympathise with S. Jerome's physical sufferings. While S. Jerome remained in the state of doubt, comforting himself between fastings and night-long vigils by reading Cicero and Plautus, 3 he fell one 1 Jerome Epistles, 3. 2 Erasmus Epistles, 71. 3 Epistle XXII. 30. S. JEROME 255 night, when he was so wasted by fever that his funeral preparations were begun, into a vision. The story is well known : he dreamed that he had already come to judgment : " Suddenly I was caught up in the spirit and dragged before the judgment-seat of the Judge; 1 and here the light was so bright, and those who stood around were so radiant, that I cast myself upon the ground and did not dare to look up. Asked who and what I was, I replied, ' I am a Christian.'' But he who presided said : ' Thou liest, thou art a follower of Cicero and not of Christ : for " where thy treasure is. there will thy heart be also.'"'' Instantly I became dumb." Coming to from his agony of suffering, and slowly recovering health, Jerome, who once, going to Jerusalem, carried a copy of Plato with him that he might not waste his time, resolved to eschew from that hour the study of the classics. Yet he is a noteworthy instance of the truth, pro- claimed by every great teacher, that the early days of life determine the course of the after years. Though, with a view to perfecting his knowledge of theology, S. Jerome now devoted himself to a study of Hebrew ; and though, during his visit to Constantinople in 380, with a similar purpose, he completed, with the help of S. Gregory 1 Epistle XXII. 30. 256 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION Nazianzen, his study of Greek, he could not banish from his heart and mind those old studies in the great writers which had filled his student years. Writing in his later life the precise date is uncertain to Sabianus, a deeply erring deacon, Jerome cries aloud, as he casts about for words of sufficient reprobation : l " Oh for the sea of Tully's eloquence ! Oh for the impetuous current of the invective of Demosthenes ! " By the natural energy of his temperament (in his first extant letter he writes of "inactivity acting like rust upon the intellect "), by his inborn ability, by his youthful training, which developed intellect, judgment, and taste, by all his varied experience of men and letters, S. Jerome was rendered incapable of condemning or abandoning altogether the intellectual life. Nor would other men allow him to hide his light under a bushel. Bishop Damasus seized upon him, took advice upon his own reading, urged him on to that Latin translation of the Scriptures, so sorely needed by the Latin Church of the fourth century, honoured throughout Catholic Christendom as the Vulgate ; and probably to the translation of the Psalter, which as the Roman Psalter was used by the Latin Church till 1566, when it was abandoned for the 1 Epistle CXLVII. S. JEROME 257 Gallican Psalter except in the Vatican Church, Milan Cathedral, and S. Mark's at Venice. Another of S. Jerome's contemporaries, Sulpitius Severus, recognised his supreme ability; for in the eighth chapter of his Dialogues he speaks of " the merit due to him on account of his faith, and the possession of many virtues; he is a man leamed not only in Latin and Greek, but also Hebrew, to such a degree that no one dare venture to compare himself with him in all knowledge ... he is, in fact, read the whole world over." Such was the man whom Damasus made Secretary to the Roman See. But he only retained the position for three years, retiring in 385 to Bethlehem, where he founded a monastery in the following year. It is particularly interesting to the student of the History of Education to learn 'that here S. Jerome found the impossibility of keeping his resolution to forego all reading of the classics. He gathered round his monastic cell a school of boys ; and these he instructed in Grammar, and we know how comprehensive that subject was, specially in his old friend Plautus, in Terence, and above them all in " Roman Virgil." And possibly in the closing paragraph of his Lives of Illustrious Men the sympathetic reader may discern the influence of a scholarly, literary 258 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION spirit which, as in a later age it inspired our own Milton to hope that he might eventually write something which his countrymen "would not willingly let die, 1 ' impelled S. Jerome to take some pride in his own writings : " I, Jerome, son of Eusebius ... up to the present year, that is, the fourteenth of the Emperor Theodosius, have written the following. 11 A long list of works ensues, and then come the closing words, " many others . . . which are not yet finished, and which I am still at work upon. 11 It is difficult only those who have tried know how difficult for any critic, except those few who are naturally allied to the Batrachians, to divest himself of his prejudices. But it seems incredible that any student of S. Jerome^ life and letters, not hopelessly biassed by a dislike to Christianity in any and every form, should fail to see in him one of those conscientious wrestlers who live in perpetual inward strife; the scholar at handgrips with the theologian, the intellect rising up against the conscience, and the conscience against the intellect. To class him among the opponents of learning and education seems ludi- crously inept. There is a letter of his, written to Magnus, a Roman orator, 1 in defence of quotations from 1 Epistle LXX. S. JEROME 259 "secular literature." In this, not at all in any supposed spirit of Christian depreciation, but in the true scholar spirit, S. Jerome exalts other Christian writers at his own expense : " Read these and you will find that I am a mere tyro in learning, and, that as my wits have long lain fallow, I can barely recall as in a dream what I have learned as a boy." These words carry no suggestion that he deems ignorance meritorious. S. Jerome, in his letter, goes on to argue that " in Moses and in the prophets there are passages cited from Gentile books, and that Solomon proposed questions to the philosophers of Tyre and answered others put to him by them. In the commencement of the Book of Proverbs he charges us to understand prudent maxims and shrewd adages, parables and ob- scure discourse, the words of the wise and their dark sayings; all of which belong by right to the sphere of the dialectician and the philosopher."" Even if modern scholarship and research should prove that Solomon was not the author of the Book of Proverbs, this discovery would not vitiate Jerome's argument. The constant quotations from it by S. Paul, and its place among the Canonical 260 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION Scriptures, prove its general acceptance by the Christian Church, and that is all that is essential to S. Jerome's effective use of it. S. Jerome also mentions the three well-known instances of S. Paul's quotations from the classics from Epimenides, Menander, and Aratus; he cites the numerous works of learning produced by members of the Eastern Churches ; adding, " All these writers so frequently interweave in their books the doctrines and maxims of the philosophers that you might easily be at a loss which to admire most, their secular erudition or their knowledge of the Scriptures." When he turns his attention to his own Church, the Latin, the poverty of the land is laid bare ; but even here S. Jerome can point to the erudition of Tertullian ; the " knowledge of all history," the " splendid rhetoric and argument " of Cyprian ; and the " ability as a writer " of a contemporary bishop, Hilary. Then, in the closing paragraph of this letter, he writes the following decisive words: "You must not adopt the mistaken opinion that while in dealing with the Gentiles one may appeal to their literature, in all other discussions one ought to ignore it; for almost all the books of these writers except those who, like Epicurus, are no S. JEROME 261 scholars are extremely full of erudition and philosophy." l Besides the intentional defence which he makes from time to time of secular learning, there are chance sentences scattered up and down the letters which betray the habits and standpoint of the scholar. For instance, in Letter CVIII. he writes, "Self-confidence is the worst of teachers." Again in Letter CXXI. we have a proof of the minute care he thought essential in composition. Writing to Lucinius concerning some MSS. of his own works which he was sending to this rich Spaniard, Jerome says : " As for my poor works, which from no merit of theirs, but simply from your own kindness you say that you desire to have ; I have given them to your servants to transcribe, I have seen the paper- copies made by them, and I have repeatedly ordered them to correct them by a diligent com- parison with the originals." Writing to Lseta concerning her infant daughter Paula, Jerome says : " Let her treasures be not silks or gems, but manuscripts of the Holy Scriptures; and in these let her think less of gilding and Babylonian parchment and arabesque patterns, than of correctness and accurate punctuation." 2 This is not an isolated instance. In his Preface to the 1 Epistle LXX. 8 Epistle CVII. 262 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION Book of Job, Jerome writes: "Let those who will keep the old books with their gold and silver letters on purple skins, or, to follow the ordinary phrase, in 'uncial characters, 1 loads of writing rather than manuscripts, if only they will leave for me and mine our poor pages and copies which are less remarkable for beauty than for accuracy. 11 It is idle to argue that Jerome is in these cases speaking either of the Scriptures or of theological works; the spirit of scholarly toil, the love of absolute accuracy, the painstaking search for truth are the same whether applied to sacred or profane learning. Perhaps this is a suitable place to argue that some of the Christians at least held that there is a knowledge which is not attained in the ordinary way of intellectual achievement; Lactantius, e.g., clearly regards " the truth that is the secret of the Most High God" as extra-rational, a matter of special revelation: "The truth that is the secret of the Most High God who created all things cannot be attained by our own ability and per- ceptions. 111 And again, "The truth is revealed from heaven to us who have received the mystery of true religion. 11 1 The Divine Institutes, 1'reface. S. JEROME 263 Origen, too, dwells on the necessity of spirit understanding spirit: "To see and to be seen is a property of bodies; to know and to be known an attribute of intellectual beings . . . whatever among bodily natures is called seeing and being seen, is termed between the Father and the Son a knowing and being known, by means of the power of know- ledge, not by the frailness of sight . . . what else is seeing God in heart but, according to our exposition as above, understanding and knowing Him in the mind." 1 Words are clumsy means of expressing meta- physical views, whether they are handled by a Christian or a non-Christian. But lest Lactantius and Origen should be thought to draw too clear a line between intellectual and spiritual knowledge, it should be remembered that in the same treatises ( from which the above passages are taken Lactantius wrote : " I thus briefly define the sum of this knowledge, that neither is any religion to be undertaken without wisdom, nor any wisdom to be approved without religion " ; and Origen wrote : " The intellect is sharpened by exercises of learning, and the powers implanted within it for intelligent purposes are called forth ; and it is rendered capable of greater intellectual efforts, not being increased 1 De Priruipiis, chap. i. 264 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION by bodily additions, but carefully polished by learned exercises." The Christian Fathers, at any rate, busied them- selves with the problems of life and mind; they may not have solved them, but they neither neglected nor shirked them. It is time to turn to another aspect of S. Jerome's work, a side which differentiates him from the other Christian Fathers, namely, his care for the spiritual and intellectual welfare of women. It is often claimed for Christianity that among its other boons to mankind, it altered for the better the position of women and slaves. The first of these changes came slowly at first, it is hardly too much to say imperceptibly. We can scarcely forget that though S. Paul is often dismissed as if he only condemned women to silence and forbade them to teach, yet he seems to imply that his "dearly beloved son" Timothy had learned much from two women : "The unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice." * As the centuries passed on, the responsibility and influence of Christian women, and specially of Christian mothers, was recognised increasingly. The name of S. Monica, mother of S. Augustine 1 2 Tim. i. 5. S. JEROME 265 of Hippo, will occur to everyone; that of Nonna, the saintly and carefully educated mother of S. Gregory Nazianzen, is less well known. S. Gregory also bears witness to the virtues of S. Basil's mother Emmelia, and to the thoroughness of his upbringing at Rome, due, at any rate in part, to her : " Who has not known Emmelia, whose name was a forecast of what she became, or else whose life was an exemplification of her name. For she had a right to the name which implies gracefulness, and occupied, to speak concisely, the same place among women as her husband among men. 1 ' 1 "When sufficiently trained at home, as he 1 ' (Basil) "ought, to fall short in no form of excellence, and not be surpassed by the busy bee, which gathers what is most useful from every flower, he set out for the city of Caesarea, to take his place at the schools there. 11 2 This last sentence is interesting as showing that the Christians still valued the early home education which the Romans, among whom they lived, were tending to abandon and depreciate. S. Basil himself acknowledges his debt to his grandmother: "I was brought up by my grand- mother, beloved woman ! . . . I mean the celebrated Macrina, who taught me the words of the most 1 Panegyric on S. Basil, sec. 10. 3 Ibid. sec. 13. blessed Gregory, which, as far as memory had preserved down to her own day, she cherished herself, while she fashioned and formed me, while yet a child, upon the doctrines of piety." But it is in studying the life and work of S. Jerome that the student of early Christianity is struck first with the growing importance attached to the education of women. The impulse was given not by Jerome, however, but by Athanasius. Horrified at the corruption of Roman aristocratic life, he preached asceticism in the home of self- indulgence and corruption ; and, preaching it, won listeners and at last followers. One of the most distinguished of these was Marcella, a widow, rich, of high rank, and, according to S. Jerome, "distin- guished for her beauty." * S. Jerome records a greater wonder than her beauty : "In a slander-loving community such as Rome . . . detraction assailed the upright, and strove to defile even the pure and clean. In such an atmosphere it is hard to escape from the breath of calumny . . . who ever heard a slander of Marcella that deserved the least credit?" 2 This Marcella made her palace on Mount Aventine a meeting-place for Christians, and built an Oratory in it. Her house became the centre of women's 1 Letter to Principia, CXXVII. 2 Ibid. S. JEROME 267 work, most of the members of her society being ladies of the highest Roman rank. It was she who welcomed Jerome to her house when he first came to Rome as Secretary of the Roman Council. Associated with her was her brother Pammachius, several Roman senators of high rank, and a sister of S. Ambrose of Milan. There were Asella, Marcella's sister, whom Jerome salutes as " illustrious model " ; Albina, their mother ; Marcellina and Felicitas ; there were Furia, whom Jerome addresses as "my daughter in Christ," and her sister-in-law, Blaesilla, of whom he says that she "fulfilled in a short time of life a long time of virtue " : these and other names of women, devoted to good works, live in the pages of Jerome's letters. But above them all, in spite of the voices of envy and detraction and malice, he esteemed Paula and Eustochium, "who, whatever the world may think, are always mine in Christ." 1 It is in Epistle CVIII., the famous letter to Eustochium, that we learn the details of Paula's descent, life, and works. "If all the members of my body were to be converted into tongues, and if each of my limbs were to be gifted with a human voice, I could still do no justice to the virtues of the holy and 1 Epistle XLV. to Asella. 268 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION venerable Paula. Noble in family, she was nobler still in holiness." With that panegyric, S. Jerome opens his letter of consolation to Eustochium on the death of her mother, Paula. The reproach, if it were one, of appealing only to the poor and illiterate, could no longer be urged against Christianity. Roman nobles, officials, and ladies of high rank were numbered among the devotees of the faith. Of Paula, S. Jerome goes on to write : " Of the stock of the Gracchi and descended from the Scipios, the heir and representative of that Paulus whose name she bore, the true and legitimate daughter of that Martia Papyria who was mother to Africanus, she yet preferred Bethlehem" (i.e. S. Jerome's community there) "to Rome, and left her palace glittering with gold to dwell in a mud cabin." Paula's husband, Toxotius, in "whose veins ran the noble blood of JEneas and the Julii," died when she was thirty-five, leaving her with four daughters and a son. 1 Blaesilla, who married the brother of Furia, mentioned above; Paulina, the wife of Pammachius the Roman Senator, who became a monk after her death ; Eustochium, the first highly born Roman lady who became a nun, and Rufina, were the daughters. The one son 1 Epistle CVIII. sec. 4. S. JEROME 269 was named Toxotius, after his father. He married eventually Laeta; their child was called Paula. It is concerning this child that S. Jerome wrote one of his letters upon the education of a girl. The other is addressed to Gaudentius concerning his daughter. M. Compayre" speaks of these letters as "the most precious pedagogical documents of the early Christian centuries. 11 But one point he hardly makes clear, namely, that these letters concern the education of girls who are to be nuns: they are accordingly, with their recommendations, of limited application. If this be remembered, the asceticism of the system will become intelligible, and we shall not condemn from one standpoint a plan which was drawn up from another. Let us turn then to these two letters, CVII. to Lseta, written in 403, and CXXVIII. to Gaudentius, dated 413. The precepts of S. Jerome concerning the education of Paula may be divided into intellectual, moral, and physical. He is interested even in the elements of intel- lectual instruction; Paula is to be taught to read and write while she is still a tiny child: "Get for her a set of letters made of boxwood or of ivory and called each by its proper name. Let her play with these, so that even her play may 270 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION teach her something. And not only make her grasp the right order of the letters and see that she forms their names into a rhyme, but con- stantly disarrange their order and put the. last letters in the middle, and the middle ones at the beginning, that she may know them all by sight as well as by sound." Of course, S. Jerome's aim / / here is to discourage "parrot knowledge," from e outset of education. Then follows his advice on teaching writing: "So soon as she begins to use the style upon the wax, and her hand is still faltering, either guide her soft fingers by laying your hand upon hers, or else have simple copies cut upon a tablet, so that her efforts confined within these limits may keep to the lines traced out for her, and not stray outside these." Good spelling is to follow reading and writing in this simple curriculum. S. Jerome proceeds from these elements to the "training of memory." The words Laeta uses are not to be chosen by chance, they are to Have a natural connection. Thus Jerome rests the strengthening of memory on association. It might interest the practical teacher to compare his views with those of Dr. Stout (Outlines of Psychology), as the latter directs us to study the concentration of attention as an aid to memory. S. JEROME 271 Three matters much debated by subsequent educationalists, S. Jerome mentions here: the legitimacy of prizes, the place of emulation, the necessity for making work pleasant. The legiti- macy of prizes he does not even question : " Offer prizes for good spelling," he says, "and draw her onwards with little gifts, such as children of her age delight in."" His views on emulation are perhaps rather crude to us of a later generation, and seem strangely at variance with the general trend of his moral teaching : " Let her have companions in her lessons to excite emulation in her, that she may be stimu- lated when she sees them praised. You must not scold her if she is slow to learn, but must employ praise to excite her mind, so that she may be glad when she excels others, and sorry when she is excelled by them." In these pages S. Jerome seems to mingle two methods which have no essential connection. When he writes, "You must not scold her if she is slow to learn," the judicious teacher acquiesces, remembering Ascham's remarks, "I assure you there is no such whetstone to sharpen a good wit and encourage a will to learning, as praise" ; and again, "I know by good experience that a child shall take more profit of two faults gently warned 272 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION of than of four things rightly hit" (The Scole Master). But when S. Jerome commends the use of emula- tion, we can only wonder why a Christian Father, so anxious generally to produce humility, should not rather have taken up the position of Immanuel Kant: "We only excite envy in a child by telling him to compare his own work with the work of others. He ought rather to compare himself with a concept of his reason. For humility is really nothing else than the compar- ing of his own worth with the standard of moral perfection. 1 ' Those educators who have relied on emulation are, of course, sensible, as every practised teacher is, of the necessity of providing some stimulus or spur. Those who choose as the object of com- parison the standard (whether intellectual or moral) rather than the classmates, are surely the most truly educational, and one might say, with all deference to the great Jerome, the most in harmony with the inner spirit of Christianity. The theory of the primrose path begins early in education ; but there will stih 1 be some like the Abbe Galiani, who fancy that the wisest as well as the kindest training for children is that which accustoms them from the beginning to take the S. JEROME 273 rough with the smooth: 1 "My treatise on educa- tion is already finished: I prove that education is the same for man and beast. It comes down to these two principles, 'learn to suffer injustice, learn to endure ennui. . . .' The rule is universally true; all pleasant methods of teaching children are false and absurd ; it is not a matter of learning geography or geometry, it is a question of habitu- ating one's self to work, that is to say, to the weariness of concentrating one's attention on a thing." When Jerome insists that Laeta shall choose for Paula " a master of approved years, life, and learn- ing," the reader wonders if Locke remembered it as he urged Mr. Clarke to believe 2 "that the great work of a Governor is to fashion the Carriage, and form the Mind ; to settle in his Pupil good Habits and the Principles of Virtue and Wisdom ; to give him 1 by little and little a View of Mankind, and work him into a Love and Imitation of what is excellent and praiseworthy ; and in the Prosecution of it, to give him Vigour, Activity, and Industry." S. Jerome lays stress on another matter which has attracted the attention of all great writers on education, namely, the importance of the beginning. 1 Letter to Mme. d'Epinay, Aug. 4, 1770. 3 Thoughts coticerni*g Education, para. 94. 18 274 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION Though the Abb Galiani is alone perhaps in maintaining that 1 "a child has received the most powerful part of its education by the time it is two years of age," yet Plato, Quintilian, Vittorino da Feltre, Mulcaster, Colet, Erasmus, Locke, J. S. Mill, Cardinal Manning, and Archbishop Temple are only some among the great men who have insisted on the all-importance of the early years. Erasmus, indeed, quotes S. Jerome's quotation in this letter from Horace : " Early impressions are hard to eradicate from the mind. When once wool has been dyed purple, who can restore it to its previous whiteness ? An unused jar long retains the taste and smell of that with which it is first filled." When Jerome argues that "things must not be despised as of small account in the absence of which great results cannot be achieved. The very rudiments and first beginnings of knowledge sound differently in the mouth of an educated man and of an uneducated," he has probably in his mind those passages of Quintilian's Institutes where he protests against illiterate nurses or uncultured pedagogues. Later on in the letter, Jerome advises that Laeta should learn Latin and Greek. It is interesting to remember that her grandmother 1 Letter to Mme. d'Epinay, April 3, 1773. S. JEROME 275 Paula and her Aunt Blaesilla were both Hebrew scholars. The account of the intellectual side of Paula's instruction may be closed with the Father's remark : "She must not therefore learn as a child what afterwards she will have to unlearn."" The modern pedagogue will have little fault to find with Jerome's advice on instruction so far as it goes, except perhaps with that which he gives concerning emulation. His precepts grow to use Rousseau's favourite term " monastic " when he turns to moral and physical education. His re- marks on sumptuous dress, however, are not more scathing than Locke's on the same subject; and no one could accuse that chilly philosopher of undue regard for monastic tenets. Similarly, Jerome's observations in favour of plain food and against gluttons would have found favour in Locke's eyes. It is interesting, too, to notice that Jerome deprecates "long and immoderate fasts in which week is added to week, and even oil and apples are forbidden as food." He does this on two grounds: first, because of youth, a child of tender years cannot fast; and, secondly, because of the chance of subsequent failure. "We must take care that we do not after starting well fall half-way." S. Jerome does 276 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION not elaborate this idea; but surely it is a root principle, a most important element in moral education. An overstrained ideal, the "high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard," is perhaps if not as often, yet very frequently, as responsible for carelessness, despair, and surrender as an over low ideal is for lack of effort, supineness, and base self-content. "I have learned by experience, 11 says S. Jerome, " that the ass toiling along the highway makes for an inn when it is weary, 1 ' a touch of humanity which, as his English Editor points out, recalls S. Francis 1 dying regret, " I have sinned against my brother the ass. 11 It is under the head of physical education that S. Jerome's requirements repel the modern teacher. He allows the use of the bath to children : " As, before children come to a robust age, abstinence is dangerous, and trying to their tender frames, let her have baths if she require them. 11 But he distinctly forbids this hygienic necessity to a "virgin of full age. 11 If S. Jerome had been impelled by the luxury and worse (than luxury) of the Roman women of his time to forbid Christians the use of the public baths, readers free from partisan bias might have understood and even appreciated his point of view. But it S. JEROME 277 must be admitted that.he regards dirt as a virtue. It is a pity, no doubt, and he is not alone in his view: the Church apparently has always numbered among its sons and daughters some extremists who think it meritorious when a Christian woman, in the words of S. Jerome, " by a deliberate squalor makes haste to spoil her natural good looks. 1 " S. Jerome had apparently forgotten the passage from Origen's De Prindpiis, which he had himself translated into Latin " Our understanding . . . knows the Father of the world from the beauty of His works and the comeliness of His creatures. 71 Finally, in this scheme of Christian education, S. Jerome includes domesticity: "Let her learn how to spin wool, to hold the distaff, to put the basket in her lap, to turn the spinning-wheel, and to shape the yarn with her thumb."" The letter to Gaudentius concerning the educa- tion of his daughter Pacatula proceeds on similar lines to those of the Epistle to Lseta; but here and there recommendations are somewhat elaborated. Lest anyone should think of S. Jerome as merely a grim ascetic interested in the training of nuns, the following passages may show that he had a touch of genuine love and comprehension of chil- dren, like Ascham, or Locke, or Pestaloz/l " How ^an you speak of self-control," he asks, " to a child 278 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION who is eager for cakes, who babbles on her mother's knee, and to whom honey is sweeter than any words? Will she hear the deep things of the apostle when all her delight is in nursery tales ? . . . Shall I urge her to obey her parents when with her chubby hand she beats her smiling mother ? " l The intellectual curriculum is rather more detailed in this letter: "Let her learn the alphabet, spelling, grammar, and syntax. 11 Pacatula is to be rewarded like Paula; but Jerome adds in her case a recommendation which recalls Locke's advice about children who ask : " Give her what she asks for. but show her that those are most praised who ask for nothing." Locke, of course, would not agree with the first part of this advice, but he was extremely insistent on the wisdom of teaching children "not to ask, 11 and more still, " not to crave. 11 In both these letters S. Jerome urges the im- portance of associates; Locke himself, whose favourite thesis it was, could not speak more definitely. Pacatula is to be consigned, like Paula, like Locke's "young gentleman, 11 to "one whose words will form her childish mind to the practice of virtue. 11 Again S. Jerome returns to the opportunities of 1 Epistle CXXVIII. to Gaudentius. S. JEROME 279 the early years : " As water follows a finger drawn through the sand, so one of soft and tender years is pliable for good or evil; she can be drawn in whatever direction you choose to guide her."" This letter avoids the tendency towards asceti- cism shown by the former, and so is perhaps more attractive to the modern mind ; but there is enough in both of them of interest to us of so different an age to justify Compayre's remark, that they are the "most precious pedagogical document of the first days of Christianity. 1 ' If the foregoing pages have not succeeded in showing that the Christians played a considerable, even a distinguished, part in education, nothing that can be said in the closing lines will do it. A question may be put in place of any further state- ment. When we reflect upon the chaos, the disruption, and the heterogeneity of conflicting races in these first Christian centuries; when we contemplate the variety of other tasks which they had to fulfil (and when Mr. Symonds refers to the necessity of "making the creeds," those acquainted with the schisms and heresies which tore the Church asunder in these years will realise that, if his intention were sarcastic, he nevertheless pointed to a gigantic work attempted and performed), when we take all these circum- 280 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION stances into consideration, can we find any other community so hampered, so charged with responsi- bility, who, in a similar length of time, sowed educational seeds which brought forth a richer, more abundant, more valuable harvest than the society of the early Christians? ADDENDUM. THE OCTAVIUS OF FELIX MINUCIUS. FELIX MINUCIUS cannot be included in a chapter dealing with the Christian Fathers; for though a Christian, he was, according to S. Jerome, 1 "a distinguished advocate of Rome." Lactantius, 2 too, in attempting to rebut the charge of illiteracy brought against the early Christians, refers to Minucius Felix as being "of no ignoble rank among pleaders." But it seems impossible to omit all mention of the writer of the dialogue, carried on in the presence of an umpire, between Caecilius Natalis the Pagan, and Octavius Januarius the Christian. This is the dialogue known as the Octavius of Minucius Felix. Its date is uncertain, though Minucius is careful to state the season of the year : 3 " after the summer days, the autumn 1 Lives of Illustrious Men, Iviii. * Divine Institutes, v. i. 3 The Octavius, chap. ii. 281 season was tending to a milder temperature " ; but it is generally attributed to the end of the second or the beginning of the third century. The main interest of the dialogue lies, of course, in the fact that it is an early Apology for Chris- tianity ; but it contains, incidentally, details which are of use to the student of the history of education and learning. The principal arguments on which Caecilius relies are (a) the uncertainty of all human knowledge; (b) the prosperity of the Roman Empire during the national adherence to the old religion ; (c) the folly and gross immorality of the Christian religion (though, after bringing shocking charges, he does add : " I know not whether these things are false ") ; (d) the improbability of future reward and the certainty of present suffering for the Christians ; (e) the unwisdom of settling matters on which " so great men are deliberating." There is nothing in all this particularly germane to education; but in the course of his arguments Caecilius commits himself to the following statements : (1) "All men must be indignant, all men must feel pain, that certain persons and these unskilled in learning, strangers to literature, without know- ledge even of sordid arts should dare to determine on any certainty concerning the nature at large, THE OCTAVIUS OF FELIX MINUCIUS 283 and the (divine) majesty of which so many of the multitude of sects in all ages (are still in doubt), and philosophy itself deliberateth still." (2) "Is it not a thing to be lamented that men ... of a reprobate, unlawful, and desperate faction, should rage against the gods ? who having gathered together from the lowest dregs the more unskilled, and women, credulous and, by the facility of their sex, yielding, establish a profane con- spiracy ... a people skulking and shunning the light, silent in public, and garrulous in corners. 1 * (3) "If you have any wisdom or modesty, cease from prying into the regions of the sky, and the destinies and secrets of the world : it is sufficient to look before your feet, especially for untaught, boorish, rustic people; they who have no capacity for understanding civil matters are much more denied the ability to discuss divine. 1 ' When we reflect that Caecilius (who, even if he were not the hero of the inscriptions, found in his native town of Cirta, which describe him as a rich magis- trate addicted to great acts of popular generosity, was evidently a man of education and culture) brought these charges in the presence of the dis- tinguished advocate Minucius Felix, and against Octavius (of whom Minucius l speaks as " my excel - 1 Chap. i. 284 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION lent and most faithful companion/ 1 and whom he describes as a man of business (chap, ii.), both of whom were professing Christians, we cannot but feel surprise. That he could do so seems to prove that they were common, everyday accusations, and so not especially and personally offensive to his hearers. With the answering defence of the Christians made by Octavius, the student of education has but little to do ; but in regard to Caecilius' 1 charge of illiteracy, the following passages are of interest. The first asks Who are the wise ? The second is a plea for more general knowledge, as the outcome of reflection. (1) " Since my brother broke out in such expres- sions as these, that he was grieved, that he was vexed, that he was indignant, that he regretted that illiterate, poor, unskilled people should dispute about heavenly things : let him know that all men are begotten alike, with a capacity and ability of reasoning and feeling, without preference of age, sex, or dignity : nor do they obtain wisdom by fortune, but have it implanted by nature ; moreover, that the very philosophers themselves, or any others who have gone forth into celebrity as discoverers of arts, before they attained an illustrious name 1 Chap. xvi. THE OCTAVIUS OF FELIX MINUCIUS 285 by their mental skill, were esteemed plebeian, un- taught, half naked : thus that rich men, attached to their means, have been accustomed to gaze more upon their gold than upon heaven, while our sort of people, though poor, have both discovered wisdom and have delivered their teaching to others ; whence it appears that intelligence is not given to wealth, nor is gotten by study, but is begotten with the very formation of the mind. Therefore it is nothing to be angry or grieved about, though anyone should inquire, should think, should utter his thoughts about divine things; since what is wanted is not the authority of the arguer, but the truth of the argument itself; and even the more unskilled the discourse, the more evident the reasoning, since it is not coloured by the pomp of eloquence and grace, but as it is, is sustained by the rule of right." It is evident that here at the close, Octavius 1 is earned away by partisan zeal into declaiming against study. He does not really mean that native intelligence, which, in the spirit of the new Christian democracy, he claims for the less fortunate in other gifts, is not to be developed and cultivated, because the next chapter opens with a plea for the extension of knowledge by thought and study. 1 Chap. xvii. 286 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION (2) " Neither do I refuse to admit what Caecilius earnestly endeavoured to maintain among the chief matters, that man ought to know himself, and to look around and see what he is, whence he is, why he is ; whether collected together from the elements, or harmoniously formed of atoms, or rather made, formed, and animated by God. And it is this very thing which we cannot seek out and investigate without inquiry into the universe ; since things are so coherent, so linked and associated together, that unless you diligently examine into the nature of divinity, you must be ignorant of that of humanity. Nor can you well perform your social duty, unless you know that community of the world which is common to all, especially since in this respect we differ from the wild beasts, that while they are prone and tending to the earth, and are born to look upon nothing but their food, we, whose coun- tenance is erect, whose look is turned towards heaven, as is our converse and reason, whereby we recognise, feel, and imitate God, have neither right nor reason to be ignorant of the celestial glory-- which forms itself into our eyes and senses." Octavius then appeals to the "heaven itself," " broadly expanded " ; " to the year, how it is made by the circuit of the sun"; to "the month, how the moon drives it round in her increase, decline, THE OCTAVIUS OF FELIX MINUCIUS 287 and decay"; to "the stars," as "they govern the course of navigation, or bring on the season of ploughing and reaping," as a proof of the existence of a "Supreme Artist and a perfect Intelligence" " to create, to construct, and to arrange." And he secures his position by arguing that these matters " cannot be felt, perceived, and understood without the highest intelligence and reason." Thus, in a few lines, he sets forth the general Christian defence which recurs, in one form or another, in the writings of the early apologists, the defence which amounts to this the Christian life may be lived by the simple, who take their faith somewhat on trust; but the Christian philosophy, like any other, can only be understood in its fulness by the " highest intelligence and reason." Octavius, whatever his fate nowadays, succeeded in convincing Caecilius. Printed by MORRISON & GIBB LIMITED Edinburgh UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. JUL t 5 1958 SV BJECT TO FINE IF N( EDUCATION JUN 2 7 1962 OCT 14 1963 * ^ RETURNED TO LJ3UARY OCT 2 1 1961 NOV 6 1961 OCT 21^ Xjj5| FEB 28 1962 DEC 151966 A f ril U,i*: 1 i raM M-Y *i l I I M^-u/ ^i^^ MAY 3 1962 JUN 1 3 1962 JON 20-1962 . ESI Form L9-100m-9,'52(A3105)444 UCLA-ED/PSYCH Library LA96H66 L 005 605 732 6 Education Library LA96 H66