Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/64

52 decided that the New Testament was written in the purest Attic Greek, and that any change was unnecessary.

We meet now a most instructive manifestation in the history of education. Formalism was blighting the Church, whether Catholic or Protestant; and blighting education, whether Jesuit or Lutheran. This formalism encountered an entirely new opposition, and all educational movement received a most peculiar shaping. Spirituality is the grace and life of some souls, as it is not the grace and life of some other souls. Never a church or party so bad as to contain no spiritually-minded. These are they who now appear, materially affecting the course and method of education. "We should see clearly the position of affairs. Speaking historically, there are two oppositions to scholastic orthodoxy in education: one, the realistic, basing itself upon an experimental philosophy, and eventually working itself out as a scientific method; the other, spiritualistic, basing itself upon the purely spiritual elements of our nature, and developing into mysticism, pietism, and all vagary. There is a singularly interesting comparison between these different attacks upon scholastic orthodoxy. We have seen how the experimental philosophy received form and power from Bacon; we have seen bow Comenius applied this philosophy to education; yet we know that education was not rescued from scholasticism. The reason, as I believe, lies in this fact: A purely or even a largely intellectual opposition was not able to reach the emotions and the conscience, and, until these were profoundly stirred, there would be no true, permanent deliverance from scholastic orthodoxy. A protest must arise from the side of the feeling. Precisely this did arise, precisely such an opposition manifested itself within both churches, appearing as Jansenism with the Catholics and pietism with the Protestants. This emotional protest, this protest in the Church herself against herself, brought clearly to view the radical antagonism between scholastic training and the newer methods everywhere appearing.

Jansen, born 1585 in North Holland, found the fundamental evil of his time to consist in the exclusive occupation of men with heathen philosophy—i.e., with Aristotelian scholastic. He made a thorough separation between philosophy and theology, believing them to rest upon widely different bases. This Jansenist movement in the Catholic Church was applied to education by the society at Port Royal. The most celebrated representatives of the method are Rollin and Fénelon. A sentence or two from Rollin will show his position: "I know that the true purpose of the teacher is not merely to make the scholars acquainted with Greek and Latin, or to teach them to write verses and exercises, or to burden their memory with events and dates from history, or to enable them to shape their conclusions in correct form, or to draw lines and figures upon paper. I do not deny that these studies are useful and worthy all praise, but only as means not as end, only when they serve as preparations to better things."Rollin is