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24  of Trèves! After bloodshed and executions, ye clamour for shows. Ye demand of your prince a circus — and for whom? For a pillaged and mined city, for a captive and plundered people, decimated and in tears!'

To the despondency thus produced in the minds of the teachers of the age by the combined spectacle of deepest social corruption and the severest national calamity, must in a great degree be attributed the disposition, now generally discernible, to abandon the ancient system of instruction — a disposition which was still further increased by the change in popular feeling. As the majority of the people became Christian by profession, and learning declined in estimation, their prejudices, once so strong against the faith which they subsequently embraced, became directed against all pagan institutions and habits of thought. Legislation, which Constantine had invoked to protect the Christian instructor, was needed in turn to protect the professor of rhetoric from persecution. Even those who, like Sedulius, Claudius Marius Victor, and Prosper, sought to impart a Christian tone to the traditional culture by applying it to new themes, found that, in the temper of the times, this middle course was impracticable.

It was precisely as this change in popular sentiment began to find expression, that the rise of the schools of Cassian afforded, in connexion with the monastic foundations, an escape from the previously existing dilemma. A system — narrow, illiberal, and defective, it must be confessed, but still a system — of education was presented which rendered the rejection of the old discipline less difficult. The choice no longer lay between the methods of paganism and the sacrifice of all methods whatever.

Monasticism, as is well known, is of oriental origin; but the spirit which it breathed and the discipline which it enforced in the East differ in many important respects from those which characterised it in western Christendom. Its dominant conception was familiar to eastern communities long before the Christian era, associated apparently, if not identical, with that theory of the contemplative life which in