Page:Syria, the land of Lebanon (1914).djvu/70

SYRIA, THE LAND OF LEBANON long been famous as a seat of learning. From the third to the sixth centuries A. D., its law school was the greatest in the Roman Empire, excelling even that of the capital and numbering its students by the thousand. One of the three commissioners who prepared the Institutes of Justinian was Professor Dorotheus of Beirut. In the early Saracen centuries, also, the city attained much scholarly fame and sent forth many of the foremost authorities on Moslem law and doctrine.

At the present day it is the greatest educational center in the Near East. Besides the schools maintained by each of the native churches and the mosque-schools and government academies, and institutions supported—presumably for political reasons—by Italy and Russia, there are schools or colleges of the French Sisters of Charity, Sisters of the Holy Family, Ladies of Nazareth, Lazarists, Franciscans, Capuchins and Jesuits, the German Deaconesses of Kaiserswerth, the British Syrian Mission, the Church of Scotland Mission to the Jews, and the American Presbyterian Mission, not to mention a number of others which have been organized by private individuals of missionary and philanthropic spirit. The total number of students who are being educated along modern lines is over twenty thousand.

Yet in this city of schools and colleges, if the stranger tells his coachman to drive to el-Kulliyet—"the College"—he will be taken without question to [ 42 ]