Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/772

752 their trivium and quadrivium in the cloister schools and cathedral schools. Scholastic philosophy had turned the activities of reason into unqualified support of the doctrines of religion. "New things seem now to take place upon the face of the earth. Copernicus discovers the sun-system, Columbus beholds another side of this great world, Magellan marks out the true form of the earth, Bacon applies his intellect to the formation of science." As we thus abruptly state these things, and as we consider their immense influence upon later history, it seems as though they came like new creations, suddenly thrust in upon the world's life, disconnected with all that preceded them, having no natural causes in the antecedent ages. It is the delightful task of history to present a development, to show the connections, be they ever so hidden, between the changing phenomena of human life. We may rest assured that not one among these startling events which make up the Reformation era is without its natural causes in the preceding times. Our task, however, is to follow education amid the changes that are taking place. Since religion was at the bottom of everything when the middle ages were closing, it follows, necessarily, that any radical reformation would appear first of all and most powerfully in religion. We know that the conflict which Luther brought to the daylight was a religious conflict, and we also realize that education could not be reached except through religion, as this was the supreme power controlling all the activities of men. Let us say, then, that the Church was divided into Catholic and Protestant. How was education affected by this division? Not so remarkably or beneficially as many would have expected. Luther, and those who worked with him, understood the power of education and wrote much upon the subject, yet they could not establish education rightly, and for a very plain reason. They needed help from the schools, they needed a training for their special teachings. The time was a time for self-defense. Therefore, after the Reformation had well set in, and after the reformers had established schools of all grades for their own children, we see no change in education except that it was made to support the Protestant religion in addition to the older faith. It was religion still with which education was vitally connected, and the reformers made no advance beyond the old scholastic system. When, therefore, we look at education after the Reformation was a fact, we find it still in the complete control of religion. We see two churches instead of one, and all the development or change that education could experience must be in the line of these church organizations.

In the Catholic Church education passed under the control of that wonderful order, the Jesuits. The Society of Jesus was a reformation within the Catholic Church, and the order exercised enormous influence. It reached directly into school and family, and made its teachings profoundly felt. These schools of the Jesuits taught, in addition to the ancient languages, mathematics, history, natural