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20 for learning, the Jesuits determined to avail themselves of this zeal in the interest of the Catholic Church, and to combat the Reformation with its own weapon. To the same purpose Dr. Russell writes: "The Jesuits in employing schools to check the growth of heresy and to win back to the Church apostate Germany, merely borrowed the devil's artillery to fight the devil with. And they used it to good effect." Two serious errors are at the root of such statements: First, it is taken for granted that the Society of Jesus was instituted directly against Protestantism, and that it used schools and learning only to counteract this movement. In the next chapter we shall prove that this view of the Society is entirely unhistorical. The second error underlying this view is the implicit belief that, before the Protestant Reformation, education was at a very low ebb, and that there existed little, if any, zeal for learning. In order to understand the rise and progress of the educational system of the Jesuits and its dependence on other schools, it will be necessary to sketch the status of education in Western Christendom before the foundation of the Society of Jesus. This sketch must be very imperfect and fragmentary in a work like the present. Besides, there exists as yet no history of education in the Middle Ages which can be considered as satisfactory, although some valuable monographs on the subject have appeared within the past few years.