Lecture II.GREEK EDUCATION.
The general result of the considerations to which I have already invited your attention is, that a study of the growth and modifications of the early forms of Christianity must begin with a study of their environment. For a complete study, it would be necessary to examine that environment as a whole. In some respects all life hangs together, and no single element of it is in absolute isolation. The political and economical features of a given time affect more or less remotely its literary and philosophical features, and a complete investigation would take them all into account. But since life is short, and human powers are limited, it is necessary in this, as in many other studies, to be content with something less than ideal completeness. It will be found sufficient in practice to deal only with the proximate causes of the phenomena into which we inquire; and in dealing, as we shall mainly do, with literary effects, to deal also mainly with those features of the age which were literary also.
The most general summary of those features is, that the Greek world of the second and third centuries was, in a sense which, though not without some just demur, has tended to prevail ever since, an educated world. Itwas reaping the harvest which many generations had sown. Five centuries before, the new elements of knowledge and cultured speech had begun to enter largely into the simpler elements of early Greek life. It had become no longer enough for men to till the ground, or to pursue their several handicrafts, or to be practised in the use of arms. The word σοφός, which in earlier times had been applied to one who was skilled in any of the arts of life, who could string a bow or tune a lyre or even trim a hedge, had come to be applied, if not exclusively, yet at least chiefly, to one who was shrewd with practical wisdom, or who knew the thoughts and sayings of the ancients. The original reasons, which lay deep in the Greek character, for the element of knowledge assuming this special form, had been accentuated by the circumstances of later Greek history. There seems to be little reason in the nature of things why Greece should not have anticipated modern Europe in the study of nature, and why knowledge should not have had for its chief meaning in earlier times that which it is tending to mean now, the knowledge of the phenomena and laws of the physical world. The tendency to collect and colligate and compare the facts of nature appears to be no less instinctive than the tendency to become acquainted with the thoughts of those who have gone before us. But Greece on the one hand had lost political power, and on the other hand possessed in her splendid literature an inalienable heritage. She could acquiesce with the greater equanimity in political subjection, because in the domain of letters she was still supreme with an indisputable supremacy. It was natural that she should turn to letters.It was natural also that the study of letters should be reflected upon speech. For the love of speech had become to a large proportion of Greeks a second nature. They were a nation of talkers. They were almost the slaves of cultivated expression. Though the public life out of which orators had grown had passed away with political freedom, it had left behind it a habit which in the second century of our era was blossoming into a new spring. Like children playing at “make-believe,” when real speeches in real assemblies became impossible, the Greeks revived the old practice of public speaking by addressing fictitious assemblies and arguing in fictitious courts. In the absence of the distractions of either keen political struggles at home or wars abroad, these tendencies had spread themselves over the large surface of general Greek society. A kind of literary instinct had come to exist. The mass of men in the Greek world tended to lay stress on that acquaintance with the literature of bygone generations, and that habit of cultivated speech, which has ever since been commonly spoken of as education.
Two points have to be considered in regard to that education before it can be regarded as a cause in relation to the main subject which we are examining: we must look first at its forms, and secondly at its mass. It is not enough that it should have corresponded in kind to certain effects; it must be shown to have been adequate in amount to account for them.
I. The education was almost as complex as our own. If we except only the inductive physical sciences, it covered the same field. It was, indeed, not so much analogous to our own as the cause of it. Our own comesby direct tradition from it. It set a fashion which until recently has uniformly prevailed over the whole civilized world. We study literature rather than nature because the Greeks did so, and because when the Romans and the Roman provincials resolved to educate their sons, they employed Greek teachers and followed in Greek paths.
The two main elements were those which have been already indicated, Grammar and Rhetoric.[9]
1. By Grammar was meant the study of literature.[10]In its original sense of the art of reading and writing, it began as early as that art begins among ourselves. “We are given over to Grammar,” says Sextus Empiricus,[11]“from childhood, and almost from our baby-clothes.” But this elementary part of it was usually designated by another name,[12]and Grammar itself had come to includeall that in later times has been designated Belles Lettres. This comprehensive view of it was of slow growth; consequently, the art is variously defined and divided. The division which Sextus Empiricus[13]speaks of as most free from objection, and which will sufficiently indicate the general limits of the subject, is into the technical, the historical, and the exegetical elements. The first of these was the study of diction, the laying down of canons of correctness, the distinction between Hellenisms and Barbarisms. Upon this as much stress was laid as was laid upon academic French in the age of Boileau. “I owe to Alexander,” says Marcus Aurelius,[14]“my habit of not finding fault, and of not using abusive language to those who utter a barbarous or awkward or unmusical phrase.” “I must apologize for the style of this letter,” says the Christian Father Basil two centuries afterwards, in writing to his old teacher Libanius; “the truth is, I have been in the company of Moses and Elias, and men of that kind, who tell us no doubt what is true, but in a barbarous dialect, so that your instructions have quite gone out of my head.”[15]The second element of Grammar was the study of the antiquities of an author: the explanation of the names of the gods and heroes, the legends and histories, which were mentioned. It is continued to this day in most notes upon classical authors. The thirdelement was partly critical, the distinguishing between true and spurious treatises, or between true and false readings; but chiefly exegetical, the explanation of an author’s meaning. It is spoken of as the prophetess of the poets,[16]standing to them in the same relation as the Delphian priestess to her inspiring god.
The main subject-matter of this literary education was the poets. They were read, not only for their literary, but also for their moral value.[17]They were read as we read the Bible. They were committed to memory. The minds of men were saturated with them. A quotation from Homer or from a tragic poet was apposite on all occasions and in every kind of society. Dio Chrysostom, in an account of his travels, tells how he came to the Greek colony of the Borysthenitæ, on the farthest borders of the empire, and found that even in those remote settlements almost all the inhabitants knew the Iliad by heart, and that they did not care to hear about anything else.[18]
2. Grammar was succeeded by Rhetoric—the study of literature by the study of literary expression and quasi-forensic argument. The two were not sharply distinguished in practice, and had some elements in common. The conception of the one no less than of the other had widened with time, and Rhetoric, like Grammar, was variously defined and divided. It was taught partly by precept, partly by example, and partly by practice. The professor either dictated rules and gave lists of selectedpassages of ancient authors, or he read such passages with comments upon the style, or he delivered model speeches of his own. The first of these methods has its literary monument in the hand-books which remain.[19]The second survives as an institution in modern times, and on a large scale, in the University “lecture,” and it has also left important literary monuments in theScholiaupon Homer and other great writers. The third method gave birth to an institution which also survives in modern times. Each of these methods was followed by the student. He began by committing to memory both the professor’s rules and also selected passages of good authors: the latter he recited, with appropriate modulations and gestures, in the presence of the professor. In the next stage, he made his comments upon them. Here is a short example which is embedded in Epictetus:[20]the student reads the first sentence of Xenophon’sMemorabilia, and makes his criticism upon it:
“‘I have often wondered what in the world were the grounds on which....’Rather ... ‘the ground on which....’ It is neater.”
“‘I have often wondered what in the world were the grounds on which....’
Rather ... ‘the ground on which....’ It is neater.”
From this, or concurrently with this, the student proceeded to compositions of his own. Beginning with mere imitation of style, he was gradually led to invent thestructure as well as the style of what he wrote, and to vary both the style and the subject-matter. Sometimes he had the use of the professor’s library;[21]and though writing in his native language, he had to construct his periods according to rules of art, and to avoid all words for which an authority could not be quoted, just as if he were an English undergraduate writing his Greek prose. The crown of all was the acquisition of the art of speaking extempore. A student’s education in Rhetoric was finished when he had the power to talk off-hand on any subject that might be proposed. But whether he recited a prepared speech or spoke off-hand, he was expected to show the same artificiality of structure and the same pedantry of diction. “You must strip off all that boundless length of sentences that is wrapped round you,” says Charon to the rhetorician who is just stepping into his boat, “and those antitheses of yours, and balancings of clauses, and strange expressions, and all the other heavy weights of speech (or you will make my boat too heavy).”[22]
To a considerable extent there prevailed, in addition to Belles Lettres and Rhetoric, a teaching of Philosophy. It was the highest element in the education of the average Greek of the period. Logic, in the form of Dialectic, was common to Philosophy and Rhetoric. Every one learnt to argue: a large number learnt, in addition, the technical terms of Philosophy and the outlines of its history. Lucian[23]tells a tale of a country gentleman of the old school, whose nephew went home from lecture night after night, and regaled his motherand himself with fallacies and dilemmas, talking about “relations” and “comprehensions” and “mental presentations,” and jargon of that sort; nay, worse than that, saying, “that God does not live in heaven, but goes about among stocks and stones and such-like.” As far as Logic was concerned, it was almost natural to a Greek mind: Dialectic was but the conversation of a sharp-witted people conducted under recognized rules. But it was a comparatively new phase of Philosophy that it should have a literary side. It had shared in the common degeneracy. It had come to take wisdom at second-hand. It was not the evolution of a man’s own thoughts, but an acquaintance with the recorded thoughts of others. It was divorced from practice. It was degraded to a system of lectures and disputations. It was taught in the same general way as the studies which preceded it. But lectures had a more important place. Sometimes the professor read a passage from a philosopher, and gave his interpretation of it; sometimes he gave a discourse of his own. Sometimes a student read an essay of his own, or interpreted a passage of a philosopher, in the presence of the professor, and the professor afterwards pronounced his opinion upon the correctness of the reasoning or the interpretation.[24]The Discourses of Epictetus have a singular interest in this respect, apart from their contents; for they are in great measure notes of suchlectures, and form, as it were, a photograph of a philosopher’s lecture-room.
Against this degradation of Philosophy, not only the Cynics, but almost all the more serious philosophers protested. Though Epictetus himself was a professor, and though he followed the current usages of professorial teaching, his life and teaching alike were in rebellion against it. “If I study Philosophy,” he says, “with a view only to its literature, I am not a philosopher, but alittérateur; the only difference is, that I interpret Chrysippus instead of Homer.”[25]They sometimes protested not only against the degradation of Philosophy, but also against the whole conception of literary education. “There are two kinds of education,” says Dio Chrysostom,[26]“the one divine, the other human; the divine is great and powerful and easy; the human is mean and weak, and has many dangers and no small deceitfulness. The mass of people call it education (παιδείαν), as being, I suppose, an amusement (παιδίαν), and think that a man who knows most literature—Persian and Greek and Syrian and Phœenician—is the wisest and best-educated man; and then, on the other hand, when they find a man of this sort to be vicious and cowardly and fond of money, they think the education to be as worthless as the man himself. The other kind they call sometimes education, and sometimes manliness and high-mindedness. It was thus that the men of old used to call those who had this good kind of education—men with manly souls, and educated asHerakles was—sons of God.” And not less significant as an indication not only of the reaction against this kind of education but also of its prevalence, is the deprecation of it by Marcus Aurelius: “I owe it to Rusticus,” he says,[27]“that I formed the idea of the need of moral reformation, and that I was not diverted to literary ambition, or to write treatises on philosophical subjects, or to make rhetorical exhortations ... and that I kept away from rhetoric and poetry and foppery of speech.”
II. I pass from the forms of education to its extent. The general diffusion of it, and the hold which it had upon the mass of men, are shown by many kinds of evidence.
1. They are shown by the large amount of literary evidence as to scholars and the modes of obtaining education. The exclusiveness of the old aristocracy had broken down. Education was no longer in the hands of “private tutors” in the houses of the great families. It entered public life, and in doing so left a record behind it. It may be inferred from the extant evidence that there were grammar-schools in almost every town. At these all youths received the first part of their education. But it became a common practice for youths to supplement this by attending the lectures of an eminent professor elsewhere. They went, as we might say, from school to a University.[28]The students who so went awayfrom home were drawn from all classes of the community. Some of them were very poor, and, like the “bettelstudenten” of the mediæval Universities, had sometimes to beg their bread.[29]“You are a miserable race,” says Epictetus[30]to some students of this kind; “when you have eaten your fill to-day, you sit down whining about to-morrow, where to-morrow’s dinner will come from.” Some of them went because it was the fashion. The young sybarites of Rome or Athens complained bitterly that at Nicopolis, where they had gone to listen to Epictetus, lodgings were bad, and the baths were bad, and the gymnasium was bad, and “society” hardly existed.[31]Then, as now, there were home-sick students, and mothers weeping over their absence, and letters that were looked for but never came, and letters that brought bad news; and young men of promise who were expected to return home as living encyclopædias, but who only raised doubts when they did return home whether their education had done them any good.[32]Then, as now, they wentfrom the lecture-room to athletic sports or the theatre; “and the consequence is,” says Epictetus,[33]“that you don’t get out of your old habits or make moral progress.” Then, as now, some students went, not for the sake of learning, but in order to be able to show off. Epictetus draws a picture of one who looked forward to airing his logic at a city dinner, astonishing the “alderman” who sat next to him with the puzzles of hypothetical syllogisms.[34]And then, as now, those who had followed the fashion by attending lectures showed by their manner that they were there against their will. “You should sit upright,” says Plutarch,[35]in his advice to hearers in general, “not lolling, or whispering, or smiling, or yawning as if you were asleep, or fixing your eyes on the ground instead of on the speaker.” In a similar way Philo,[36]also speaking of hearers in general, says: “Many persons who come to a lecture do not bring their minds inside with them, but go wandering about outside, thinking ten thousand things about ten thousand different subjects—family affairs, other people’s affairs, private affairs, ... and the professor talks to an audience, as it were, not of men but of statues, which have ears but hear not.”
2. A second indication of the hold which education had upon the age is the fact that teaching had come to be a recognized and lucrative profession. This is shown not so much by the instances of individual teachers,[37]whomight be regarded as exceptional, as by the fact of the recognition of teachers by the State and by municipalities.
The recognition by the State took the double form of endowment and of immunities from public burdens.
(a) Endowments probably began with Vespasian, who endowed teachers of Rhetoric at Rome with an annual grant of 100,000 sesterces from the imperial treasury. Hadrian founded an Athenæum or University at Rome, like the Museum or University at Alexandria, with an adequate income, and with a building of sufficient importance to be sometimes used as a Senate-house. He also gave large sums to the professors at Athens: in this he was followed by Antoninus Pius: but the first permanent endowment at Athens seems to have been that of Marcus Aurelius, who founded two chairs in each of the four great philosophical schools of Athens, the Academic, the Peripatetic, the Epicurean, and the Stoic, and added one of the new or literary Rhetoric, and one of the old or forensic Rhetoric.[38]
(b) The immunities of the teaching classes began with Julius Cæsar, and appear to have been so amply recognized in the early empire that Antoninus Pius placed them upon a footing which at once established and limited them. He enacted that small cities might place upon the free list five physicians, three teachers of rhetoric, and three of literature; that assize towns might so place seven physicians, three teachers of rhetoric, and three of literature; and that metropolitan cities might so place ten physicians, five teachers of rhetoric, and five of literature; but that these numbers should not be exceeded. These immunities were a form of indirect endowment.[39]They exempted those whom they affected from all theburdens which tended in the later empire to impoverish the middle and upper classes. They were consequently equivalent to the gift from the municipality of a considerable annual income.
3. A third indication of the hold of education upon contemporary society is the place which its professors held in social intercourse. They were not only a recognized class; they also mingled largely, by virtue of their profession, with ordinary life. If a dinner of any pretensions were given, the professor of Belles Lettres must be there to recite and expound passages of poetry, the professor of Rhetoric to speak upon any theme which might be proposed to him, and the professor of Philosophy to read a discourse upon morals. A “sermonette” from one of these professional philosophers after dinner was as much in fashion as a piece of vocal or instrumental music is with us.[40]All three kinds of professors were sometimes part of the permanent retinue of a great household. But the philosophers were even more in fashion than their brother professors. They were petted by great ladies. They became “domestic chaplains.”[41]They weresometimes, indeed, singularly like the chaplains of whom we read in novels of the last century. Lucian, in his essay “On Persons who give their Society for Pay,” has some amusing vignettes of their life. One is of a philosopher who has to accompany his patroness on a tour: he is put into a waggon with the cook and the lady’s-maid, and there is but a scanty allowance of leaves thrown in to ease his limbs against the jolting.[42]Another is of a philosopher who is summoned by his lady and complimented, and asked as an especial favour, “You are so very kind and careful: will you take my lapdog into the waggon with you, and see that the poor creature does not want for anything?”[43]Another is of a philosopher who has to discourse on temperance while his lady is having her hair braided: her maid comes in with abillet-doux, and the discourse on temperance is suspended until she has written an answer to her lover.[44]Another is of a philosopher who only gets his pay in doles of two or three pence at a time, and is thought a bore if he asks for it, and whose tailor or shoemaker is meanwhile waiting to be paid, so that even when the money comes it seems to do him no good.[45]It is natural to find that Philosophy, which had thus become a profession, had also become degenerate. It afforded an easy means of livelihood. It was natural that some of those who adopted it should be a disgrace to their profession. And although it would be unsafe to take every description of the great satirist literally, yet it is difficult to believe that there is not a substantial foundation of truth in his frequentcaricatures. The fact of their frequency, and also the fact that such men as he describes could exist, strengthen the inference which other facts enable us to draw, as to the large place which the professional philosophers occupied in contemporary society. The following is his picture of Thrasycles:[46]
“He comes along with his beard spread out and his eyebrows raised, talking solemnly to himself, with a Titan-like look in his eyes, with his hair thrown back from his forehead, the very picture of Boreas or Triton, as Zeuxis painted them. This is the man who in the morning dresses himself simply, and walks sedately, and wears a sober gown, and preaches long sermons about virtue, and inveighs against the votaries of pleasure: then he has his bath and goes to dinner, and the butler offers him a large goblet of wine, and he drinks it down with as much gusto as if it were the water of Lethe: and he behaves in exactly the opposite way to his sermons of the morning, for he snatches all the tit-bits like a hawk, and elbows his neighbour out of the way, and he peers into the dishes with as keen an eye as if he were likely to find Virtue herself in them; and he goes on preaching all the time about temperance and moderation, until he is so dead-drunk that the servants have to carry him out. Nay, besides this, there is not a man to beat him in the way of lying and braggadocio and avarice: he is the first of flatterers and the readiest of perjurers: chicanery leads the way, and impudence follows after: in fact, he is clever all round, doing to perfection whatever he touches.”
“He comes along with his beard spread out and his eyebrows raised, talking solemnly to himself, with a Titan-like look in his eyes, with his hair thrown back from his forehead, the very picture of Boreas or Triton, as Zeuxis painted them. This is the man who in the morning dresses himself simply, and walks sedately, and wears a sober gown, and preaches long sermons about virtue, and inveighs against the votaries of pleasure: then he has his bath and goes to dinner, and the butler offers him a large goblet of wine, and he drinks it down with as much gusto as if it were the water of Lethe: and he behaves in exactly the opposite way to his sermons of the morning, for he snatches all the tit-bits like a hawk, and elbows his neighbour out of the way, and he peers into the dishes with as keen an eye as if he were likely to find Virtue herself in them; and he goes on preaching all the time about temperance and moderation, until he is so dead-drunk that the servants have to carry him out. Nay, besides this, there is not a man to beat him in the way of lying and braggadocio and avarice: he is the first of flatterers and the readiest of perjurers: chicanery leads the way, and impudence follows after: in fact, he is clever all round, doing to perfection whatever he touches.”
4. But nothing could more conclusively prove the great hold which these forms of education had upon their time than the fact of their persistent survival. It might be maintained that the prominence which is given to them in literature, their endowment by the State, andtheir social influence, represented only a superficial and passing phase. But when the product of one generation spreads its branches far and wide into the generations that succeed, its roots must be deep and firm in the generation from which it springs. No lasting element of civilization grows upon the surface. Greek education has been almost as permanent as Christianity itself, and for similar reasons. It passed from Greece into Africa and the West. It had an especial hold first on the Roman and then upon the Celtic and Teutonic populations of Gaul; and from the Gallican schools it has come, probably by direct descent, to our own country and our own time.
Two things especially have come:
(i.) The place which literature holds in general education. We educate our sons in grammar, and in doing so we feed them upon ancient rather than upon English literature, by simple continuation of the first branch of the mediævaltrivium, which was itself a continuation of the Greek habit which has been described above.
(ii.) The other point, though less important in itself, is even more important as indicating the strength of the Greek educational system. It is that we retain still its technical terms and many of its scholastic usages, either in their original Greek form or as translated into Latin and modified by Latin habits, in the schools of the West.
The designation “professor” comes to us from the Greek sophists, who drew their pupils by promises: to “profess” was to “promise,” and to promise was the characteristic of the class of teachers with whom in the fourth centuryB.C.Greek education began. The titlelost its original force, and became the general designation of a public teacher, superseding the special titles, “philosopher,” “sophist,” “rhetorician,” “grammarian,” and ending by being the synonym of “doctor.”[47]
The practice of lecturing, that is of giving instruction by reading an ancient author, with longer or shorter comments upon his meaning, comes to us from the schools in which a passage of Homer or Plato or Chrysippus was read and explained. The “lecture” was probably in the first instance a student’s exercise: the function of the teacher was to make remarks or to give his judgment upon the explanation that was given: it was not so muchlegereasprælegere, whence the existing title of “prælector.”[48]
The use of the word “chair” to designate the teacher’s office, and of the word “faculty” to denote the branch of knowledge which he teaches, are similar survivals of Greek terms.[49]
The use of academical designations as titles is also Greek: it was written upon a man’s tombstone that he was “philosopher” or “sophist,” “grammarian” or “rhetorician,” as in later times he would be designated M.A. or D.D.[50]The most interesting of these designations is that of “sophist.” The long academical history of the word only ceased at Oxford a few years ago, when the clauses relating to “sophistæ generales” were erased as obsolete from the statute-book.
The restriction of the right to teach, and the mode of testing a man’s qualifications to teach, have come to us from the same source. The former is probably a result of the fact which has been mentioned above, that the teachers of liberal arts were privileged and endowed. The State guarded against the abuse of the privilege, as in subsequent times for similar reasons it put limitations upon the appointment of the Christian clergy. In the case of some of the professors at Athens who were endowed from the imperial chest, the Emperors seem to have exercised a certain right of nomination, as in our own country the Crown nominates a “Regius Professor;”[51]but in the case of others of those professors, the nomination was in the hands of “the best and oldest and wisest in the city,” that is, either the Areopagus, or the City Council, or, as some have thought, a special Board.[52]Elsewhere, and apparently without exception in later times, the right of approval of a teacher was in the hands of the City Council, the ordinary body for the administration of municipal affairs.[53]The authority which conferred the right might also take it away: a teacher who proved incompetent might have his licence withdrawn.[54]The testing of qualifications preceded the admission tooffice. It was sometimes superseded by a sort ofcongé d’élirefrom the Emperor;[55]but in ordinary cases it consisted in the candidate’s giving a lecture or taking part in a discussion before either the Emperor’s representative or the City Council.[56]It was the small beginning of that system of “examination” which in our own country and time has grown to enormous proportions. The successful candidate was sometimes escorted to his house, as a mark of honour, by the proconsul and the “examiners,” just as in Oxford, until the present generation, a “grand compounder” might claim to be escorted home by the Vice-chancellor and Proctors.[57]In the fourth century appear to have come restrictions not only upon teaching, but also upon studying: a student might probably go to a lecture, but he might not formally announce his devotion to learning by putting on the student’s gown without the leave of the professors, as in a modern University a student must be formally enrolled before he can assume the academical dress.[58]
The survival of these terms and usages, as indicatingthe strength of the system to which they originally belonged, is emphasized by the fact that for a long interval of time there are few, if any, traces of them.[59]They are found in full force in Gaul in the fifth and sixth centuries: they are found again when education began to revive on a large scale in the tenth century; they then appear, not as new creations, but as terms and usages which had lasted all through what has been called “the Benedictine era,”[60]without special nurture and without literary expression, by the sheer persistency of their original roots.
This is the feature of the Greek life into which Christianity came to which I first invite your attention. There was a complex system of education, the main elements in which were the knowledge of literature, the cultivation of literary expression, and a general acquaintance with the rules of argument. This education was widely diffused, and had a great hold upon society. It had been at work in its main outlines for several centuries. Itseffect in the second century of our era had been to create a certain habit of mind. When Christianity came into contact with the society in which that habit of mind existed, it modified, it reformed, it elevated, the ideas which it contained and the motives which stimulated it to action; but in its turn it was itself profoundly modified by the habit of mind of those who accepted it. It was impossible for Greeks, educated as they were with an education which penetrated their whole nature, to receive or to retain Christianity in its primitive simplicity. Their own life had become complex and artificial: it had its fixed ideas and its permanent categories: it necessarily gave to Christianity something of its own form. The world of the time was a world, I will not say like our own world, which has already burst its bonds, but like the world from which we are beginning to be emancipated—a world which had created an artificial type of life, and which was too artificial to be able to recognize its own artificiality—a world whose schools, instead of being the laboratories of the knowledge of the future, were forges in which the chains of the present were fashioned from the knowledge of the past. And if, on the one hand, it incorporated Christianity with the larger humanity from which it had at first been isolated, yet, on the other hand, by crushing uncultivated earnestness, and by laying more stress on the expression of ideas than upon ideas themselves, it tended to stem the very forces which had given Christianity its place, and to change the rushing torrent of the river of God into a broad but feeble stream.