Chapter XXIV (2)

Nor was this all. The rule of this great monastic legislator distinctly proves that children were received, and that at a very early age, to be educated among the monks. He felt great compassion, we are told, for the young, and was accustomed to say, that in the soil of their minds good seed might be sown more easily than in more advanced years. He considered them particularly capable of being trained to acquire the habit of the presence of God; by which they might afterwards advance to great perfection. Accordingly, his rule is full of provisions for the proper care of these young disciples. The monks are warned not to scandalise them, even by an incautious word: they are to have the recreation and food proper to their age, but the monks are not to sport or laugh with them; and if any boy be too much given to play and idleness, he is to receive sharp correction. They are to eat in the refectory with the brethren, and join them at their work, but at other times a sort of separation is to be observed between them and the community.[23] The terms on which the Fathers lived with their little disciples exhibit that character of paternal tenderness which was one of the distinctive features of the early Christian schools, offering a striking contrast to the state of things existing in the pagan academies. There is, indeed, frequent mention of the rod, but strict discipline was never held incompatible with affectionate familiarity. The Fathers of the Desert had received their traditions on this head from the immediate followers of Him who took the young children in His arms, and willingly suffered them to approach Him; and so it seemed but natural that they who sought to imitate their Master, should surround themselves with little ones, and permit them a certain holy familiarity which constantly reappears in the intercourse between monks and children. Every one will remember the anecdote that is told of St. Pachomius, who, in his extreme humility, did not disdain to be set right by a little boy. As he sat at work with his brethren, making mats, one of the children said to him, “My father, you are not working in the right way; the abbot Theodore does it quite differently.” “Then sit down, my child,” replied the saint, “and show me how I ought to do it;” and having received his lesson, he untwisted his osiers, and began his work all over again. Another time, the saint having returned to the monastery after an absence of some weeks, one of the children ran out to meet him, saying, “I am glad you have come back, my father; since you have been away they have given us neither soup nor vegetables for dinner.” “Well, my child,” was the kind reply, “I will take care that you do not want them for the future;” and calling the cook, he administered to him a sharp rebuke.

Sometimes, even solitaries were induced to undertake the care of children not intended for the religious state. Thus St. Chrysostom relates the example of a Christian lady living at Antioch, who was very desirous to procure for her son the blessings of a holy education, and induced a certain solitary to leave his retreat among the mountains, and undertake the care of the youth: and he adds, the boy made great progress in the sciences, but yet more in piety, and by his example won many of his playfellows to embrace a life of virtue. When, therefore, the great father of the monastic life in the Western world received his two disciples, Placidus and Maurus, with a view to their education, and so gave his followers an example which resulted in the foundation of the great Benedictine schools, he was not departing from the earlier monastic tradition, as Mabillon is careful to show.[24] Nor must the decrees of certain councils which prohibit monks from receiving any children, save those “offered” by their parents to the religious state, be understood as implying more than that such children could not be received into the _interior_ or claustral school; for, as the same writer proves, seculars were always freely admitted into the _exterior_ schools of monasteries.

St. Pachomius was not the only monastic legislator of ancient times who in his rule provided for the admission and education of children. St. Basil permitted them to be received into his monasteries at a very early age, especially if they had lost their parents, because monks should be the fathers of orphans. Their education, he says, should be strictly religious; they are to have a separate portion of the monastery assigned them, and are to be governed by one of the elder monks who shall be both mild and learned, and experienced in the care of children. He is very precise on the point which proves the _crux_ in most systems of education, namely, the method to be observed in inflicting punishment; and though he does not prohibit the use of the rod, he recommends in preference the adoption of such penances as may correct the fault, as well as punish the offender. “Let every fault have its own remedy,” he says, “so that while the offence is punished the soul may be exercised to conquer its passions. For example, has a child been angry with his companion? Oblige him to beg pardon of the other and to do him some humble service, for it is only by accustoming them to humility that you will eradicate anger, which is always the offspring of pride. Has he eaten out of meals? Let him remain fasting for a good part of the day. Has he eaten to excess, and in an unbecoming manner? At the hour of repast, let him, without eating himself, watch others taking their food in a modest manner, and so he will be learning how to behave at the same time that he is being punished by his abstinence. And if he has offended by idle words, by rudeness, or by telling lies, let him be corrected by diet and silence.”

After this he passes on to the studies of the children, and desires that instead of learning the fables of the poets they should be taught the wonderful events narrated in Scripture History. They are to learn by heart sentences chosen from the Book of Proverbs, and little prizes are to be given them in reward for their exercises of memory, “to the end that they may learn with the less reluctance, nay rather with pleasure, and as though engaging in agreeable recreation.” The masters are particularly enjoined to train them to recall their wandering thoughts and fix their attention on their work, by frequently interrogating them as to what they are thinking about. And whilst acquiring a knowledge of letters, they are likewise to be taught some useful art or trade.[25]

In most of the rules drawn up by the early Gallican prelates we see that stringent regulations were introduced for obliging all the brethren to acquire a certain knowledge of letters. “Literas omnes discant,” is the thirty-second brief and emphatic rule of St. Aurelian, Bishop of Arles in the sixth century. What is more remarkable, we find exactly the same provisions in rules drawn up for religious women, as in those of St. Donatus and St. Cæsarius of Arles.[26] The sixth chapter of the rule of St. Leander of Seville, is headed thus: _Ut jugiter virgo oret et legat._ “Let your time and occupation be so divided,” he says, “that after reading you pray, and after prayer you read; and let these two good works perpetually alternate, so that no part of your time be wholly without them. And when you do any manual work or refresh your body with needful food, then let another read, that when the hands and the eyes are intent on work the ear may be fed with the Divine Word. For if even when we read and pray we are hardly able to withdraw our minds from the temptations of the devil, how much more prone will not the soul be to vice, if it be not held back by the chain of prayer and assiduous reading.”[27] And in the chapter that follows he gives directions for the proper manner of studying the books of the Old Testament.

Before bringing these remarks to a close we cannot omit all notice of the education received in primitive times by the children of the faithful, in the bosoms of their own families. Fleury points out to his readers as one proof of the care taken by Christian parents in the instruction of their children, that in all antiquity we do not find the least notice of any public catechism for children, or any public instruction for those who had been baptized before they came to the use of reason. It was not needed, he says, for in those days, to use the words of St. Chrysostom, “every house was a Church.”[28]

The office of religious instruction generally devolved on the mother. Even in Scripture there is evidence of this, for St. Paul, writing to St. Timothy, reminds him of what he owed to the “faith unfeigned” of his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice.[29] St. Basil, and his brother St. Gregory of Nyssa, gloried in preserving the faith in which they had been trained by their grandmother St. Macrina the elder. Their other brother, St. Peter of Sebaste, was chiefly brought up by his sister of the same name. St. Gregory thus describes the extraordinary care bestowed by his mother on the education of her daughter. “My mother,” he says, “took extreme pains with her instruction, not after the manner customary with those of her age, who are ordinarily taught the fables of the poets.... Instead of these she made her learn such portions of Scripture as were easiest to understand. She began with the book of Wisdom, and thence went on to the Psalms.”[30] St. Fulgentius owed his education, not merely in sacred science, but also in polite literature, to the care of his mother Mariana, the _religiosa mater_ as she is called in his life, who was so solicitous about the purity of his Greek accent that she made him learn by heart the poems of Homer and Menander before he studied his Latin rudiments.[31] The early education, both liberal and religious, of St. John Chrysostom was in like manner directed by his admirable mother Anthusa, whose conduct in this particular drew from the lips of the pagan sophist, Libanius, the exclamation, “Ye gods of Greece! how wonderful are the women of the Christians!” In fact it is remarkable how many Christian women of early times are spoken of as being learned. Not to mention St. Catherine of Alexandria, whose case was possibly exceptional, we know that St. Thecla, the disciple of St. Paul, was versed in philosophy, poetry, and rhetoric; St. Olympia, the holy widow of Constantinople, not only corresponded with St. Chrysostom, seventeen of whose letters are addressed to her, but received the dedication of several of St. Gregory of Nazianzen’s poems. St. Jerome, again, dedicated his commentaries on Isaias and Ezechiel to his pupil St. Eustochium, who, he assures us, wrote, spoke, and recited Hebrew without the least trace of a Latin accent. And, not to multiply examples, we may just refer to that passage in his epistles where he speaks of St. Marcella, “the glory of the Roman ladies,” as showing that the learned accomplishments of these illustrious women were not acquired at any sacrifice of qualities more peculiarly becoming their sex. “What virtues did I not find in her?” he says, writing to her spiritual daughter, Principia; “what penetration, what purity, what holiness! She became so learned that after my departure from Rome, when difficulties were found in any obscure passage of Scripture, people applied to her as to a judge; yet she possessed in a sovereign degree that delicate discernment which always perceives what is becoming; and used always to communicate her ideas as if they had been suggested by somebody else, so that while instructing others, she appeared herself to be a pupil.”[32]

Never, surely, was there a greater error than that into which one of our most learned critics has fallen, when he asserts that “the idea and place of woman has been _slowly and laboriously_ elevated by the Gospel.”[33] He could not have written thus had he been as familiar with the records of the Christian Church as with those of pagan antiquity. The most perfect exemplars of Christian womanhood appear in the history of the primitive ages. The grand ideal of the Roman virgin or matron, softened, purified, and elevated by the Gospel precepts and the Apostolic teaching, retaining all its former strength, but acquiring a new element of tenderness, produced those exquisite flowers of sanctity whom the Church appears in some sort to regard as her children of predilection. They were not the growth of one Church or province, but simultaneously, wherever the Christian faith was preached, they expanded their beautiful petals to the Sun of Justice; and we have in Rome an Agnes and a Cecilia; in Sicily a Lucy and an Agatha; in Carthage a Felicitas; in Alexandria a Catherine; a Blandina in Gaul, and in barbarous Britain, an Ursula.

Whence arose this instantaneous regeneration of the womanly character? The Catholic hardly needs to ask himself the question, for the form on which it was modelled is so obvious that it requires not to be indicated. It grew out of no dead code of precepts, but out of the living memory of her, the Mother _par excellence_, the Virgin-Mother of God, and the model of all Christian virgins and mothers; she whose countenance St. Isidore describes as “gravely sweet and sweetly grave;” whose tranquil gait and gentle voice St. Ambrose has dwelt on, as well as her modesty and reverence, “rising up in the presence of her elders.” And it was she of whom he also says, gathering up the precious fragments of ancient tradition, that she was “diligent in reading,” _legendi studiosior_, a trait which reappears in the character of the holy women of early times, and which we are thus able to link on to the source whence they derived their ideal of womanly perfection.

It cannot be doubted that the influence of such women, and specially of such mothers, was a powerful means of preserving the Roman youth from the infection which hung over the public academies, even after the establishment of a nominal Christianity in the institutions of the State. But of these academies I need speak no further. They formed a part of the old Roman civilisation, and perished in its wreck, swallowed up in those waves of barbarism which, as they poured over Europe, ground to pieces every monument of the Empire, and swept their fragments into oblivion. In the midst of the deluge, however, the Ark of God floated over the waters, and accepted the mission of reconstructing a ruined world. The Church alone preserved so much as the memory of letters, though in the inconceivable troubles of the crisis her utmost efforts for a time only sufficed to keep up schools in which the clergy received the instruction necessary for their state; and secular learning for the most part fell into decay. But the want was felt and lamented by the clergy themselves, a proof that learning, at any rate, never lost its value in their eyes. Thus, in his letter to the Council of Constantinople in 680, Pope Agatho excuses the simplicity of his legates; “for how,” he says, “can we look for great erudition among men living in the midst of barbarous nations, forced with difficulty to earn their daily bread by the labour of their hands? Nevertheless,” he adds, “they will expound to you the faith of the Apostolic Church, not with human eloquence, for they have none; but with the simplicity of the faith which we have held from our cradles.” The synodal letter of the Western bishops to the same council is couched in similar terms. “As to secular eloquence,” they say, “we think no one in our time will boast of possessing it. Our countries are continually agitated by the fury of different nations; there is nothing around us but war, invasion, and plunder. In the midst of the barbarians our life is full of disturbance, the patrimony of our churches has been seized, and we have to live by the labour of our hands. The faith is all that is left us, and our solitary glory is to preserve it during life, and to be ready to die in its defence.”

These two documents, often quoted, have perhaps given rise to somewhat exaggerated notions regarding the extent of the ignorance complained of. It is certain that there were periods of comparative tranquillity during which liberal studies were at least partially preserved. The schools of Gaul did not begin to decay till the end of the fifth century, and even then some were found who exerted themselves to keep alive the ancient learning; such as St. Sidonius Apollinaris, who received his education in the public schools of Lyons before his elevation to the Episcopate in 471, and Claudian Mamertus, a monk by profession and education, who was declared by his friend Sidonius to be equally incomparable in every science to which he applied. Besides being an amazing reader, he was an original thinker. His great work on “The Nature of the Soul” is said to display the precision and method of the latter scholastics, and contains proofs of the existence and immateriality of the soul drawn from its capacity of thought, which appear like anticipations of the famous Cartesian formula _Cogito, ergo sum_. In his arguments he appeals not only to the authority of Scripture and the Fathers, but also to that of Plato and other Greek philosophers, and shows himself not unacquainted with the systems of Zoroaster and the Brahmins. To him we owe the arrangement of a great part of the Breviary office, and the beautiful hymn for Passion Sunday, _Pange lingua gloriosi prœlium certamina_. For poetry, no less than philosophy, found votaries in the Gallican schools. The lyre, which had fallen from the hands of Prudentius, was still touched by St. Prosper of Aquitaine and St. Avitus of Vienne, the former of whom may be called the poet of Divine grace, whilst the latter, eleven centuries before the time of Milton, chose for the theme of his verses the Fall of Man.

Down to the beginning of the seventh century the schools of Gaul still taught Virgil and the Roman law, and in them the sons of the barbarous Visigoths received some tincture of polite letters. The Gallo-Roman nobility showed the utmost solicitude to obtain such education for their children as the times afforded; and we find notices of schools wherein grammar, rhetoric, and law were taught in separate courses after the Roman fashion. The Gallican orators, as in the time of St. Jerome, betrayed their Celtic origin by a certain verbose eloquence, which had to be pruned according to the severer rules of Roman rhetoric. The mother of Rufinus had sent him to the imperial capital, that the Roman gravity might temper the too great fecundity of the Gallic speech, and St. Desiderius of Cahors was made to go through a course of Roman jurisprudence with the same intention.

Nor, whilst noticing these evidences of a love of letters, surviving even in the period of decay, must I neglect to mention that notable academy of Toulouse, which at one time did its best to involve all Europe in a fog of learned perplexity. Its eccentricities would scarcely merit to be recorded, had they not left very distinct traces both in the Irish and Anglo-Saxon literature. The history of this academy has been written by one of its members, the false Virgil, as he is called, who has contrived to mystify both the date and whereabouts of its foundation. It is presumed, however, to have flourished at Toulouse sometime in the sixth century. Holding to the principle that pearls must not be cast before swine, certain enthusiasts of Aquitaine formed among themselves a secret scholastic society, the members of which spoke a language understood only by the initiated, and conferred on men and places the nomenclature of ancient Greece and Rome. The grand, I might almost say the exclusive, study of these illuminati was grammar. An assembly of thirty of their number had gravely determined that the subject most worthy of a wise man’s meditation was the conjugation of the Latin verb, and on this momentous theme they split into two sects, which rivalled Guelph and Ghibelline in the ardour of their mutual animosities. The heads of these two parties, whose academic names were Terence and Galbungus, spent fourteen days and nights discussing the question whether the pronoun _Ego_ had a vocative case: at last the difficulty was referred to Eneas, who decided that it might be allowed to possess one when employed in the interrogative phrase. These grammatical debates took place when Virgil was but a youth, but in his riper years he thoroughly maintained the reputation of his masters. It was the exact government of words which left him no repose, and he tells us how one night, having retired to rest, he was awaked by a knocking at his door, and found that the disturbance was caused by the arrival of a certain Spanish grammarian, named Mitterius, whom he honoured neither more nor less than if he had been a prophet of God. Mitterius begged for a night’s lodging, promising in return to answer any question which his entertainer might put to him. The opportunity was not to be lost; there was but one thing just then that Virgil desired to know, and, springing from his bed, he at once required, as the price of his hospitality, a direct rule by which he could determine when the word _hic_ was an adverb and when it was a pronoun. These anecdotes, however, give us but a faint notion of the labours of the Toulouse grammarians. The difficulties of the Latin syntax were not sufficient to satisfy their thirst for obscurity, and they therefore expended their ingenuity on inventing new means of perplexing their own brains and those of their scholars. “Was it to be supposed,” they asked, “that this noble tongue was so poor and barren, that its words could be used in one sense only? On the contrary, the true grammarian knew very well that, besides the vulgar Latin known to the common herd, there existed eleven other kinds, each of which had a distinct grammar of its own.” According to this system of “the twelve Latinities,” everything had twelve names, any one of which might be used according to pleasure. New vocabularies had to be invented, either by the Latinising of Greek roots, or transposing the letters of the original words in such a way as to form a variety of new combinations. New conjugations and declensions adorned the grammar of the initiated, and to complete their system a new prosody was added, in which the dactyls and spondees appear to have been measured, not by quantity, but by accent.[34]

Even the triumphs of the barbarians did not in all cases result in the immediate extinction of letters. In Italy a second Augustan age bid fair at one time to arise under the rule of Theodoric, the Ostrogoth. His court was adorned by the genius of two great men--Boethius, the Christian philosopher, and the last of the classic writers; and Cassiodorus, in whom closed the long line of Roman consuls. Both of them exerted a powerful influence over the studies of succeeding generations. The original Latin works of Boethius supplied the schools with a series of Christian classics which were naturally held in extraordinary esteem by teachers who, as time went on, felt with increasing force the difficulty of training Christian youth exclusively out of pagan class-books. And it was chiefly by his translations from the Greek that the mediæval scholars acquired their knowledge of the Greek philosophy, at a time when the study of that tongue had ceased to be generally pursued. A yet further addition to scholastic literature was contributed by Cassiodorus. He was not indeed the only statesman who had distinguished himself in this line. Towards the close of the fifth century Marcian Capella, an African pro-consul, had produced his celebrated work on the Espousals of Mercury and Philology, which he chooses to personify as a goddess; the seven liberal sciences, into which all known learning had been classified since the days of Philo, being represented as the handmaidens presented by the bridegroom to the bride. His _Satiricon_, written in nine books, continued to be one of the most popular text-books in use during the middle ages, and was at an early period translated into the vernacular.

But Cassiodorus was not merely a writer of schoolbooks; he was the founder of a monastic school, which, for the variety of sciences which it cultivated, has not unfrequently been given the title of a university. And indeed it was not undeserving of the name. Its noble founder, when still in the service of Theodoric, had attempted, in conjunction with Pope St. Agapetus, to found a catechetical school at Rome, on the model of those which formerly flourished at Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Nisibis, in which he proposed to maintain a staff of professors at his own expense. This magnificent design having failed, in consequence of the troubles of the time, Cassiodorus retired from a world in which he had nobly toiled for seventy years, and devoted his old age to the creation of a seminary of Christian learning on his own estate of Vivaria, at the very extremity of the Calabrian peninsula. He collected a rich library, which he increased by the labours of his monks, on whom he enjoined the transcription of books as their principal manual labour. It was to ensure their accuracy in this employment that, at the age of eighty-three, he undertook the composition of his treatise _De Orthographia_. He drew up a plan of studies for his scholars, and wrote for their use two treatises, one “On the Teaching of Sacred Letters,” and the other “On the Seven Liberal Arts.” This latter was a kind of encyclopædia, including separate treatises on each subject, which formed some of the favourite elementary class-books in use during the middle ages. Hallam remarks of this encyclopædia and of others undertaken on a similar plan, that they themselves furnish significant indications of a decadence of letters. Such collections must necessarily include only the most meagre sketches of the sciences of which they profess to treat, and their multiplication at this period indicates that men were beginning to be content with a very superficial description of knowledge. So also the numerous translations from the Greek undertaken by Boethius and Cassiodorus are sufficient evidence that the knowledge of that language was becoming rare. Nor will the praises bestowed by Cassiodorus on his friend’s versions, which he declares superior to the originals, probably raise his character as a critic in the judgment of scholars. But the fact that his labours were undertaken at a period of literary decay, when the inconceivable disorders of the time seemed to present an insuperable obstacle to the pursuit of learning, increases our admiration of the energy and zeal displayed by the old Roman, which enabled him in spite of every discouragement to create a school of sacred and profane learning, where strangers were encouraged to seek that hospitality the exercise of which was regarded as one of the most sacred duties of the brethren. There, under porticoes and gardens adorned with every beauty that could charm the eye or soothe the heart, pilgrims, weary with those scenes of violence and devastation that were turning many a fair district of Gaul and Italy into a howling wilderness, found all that remained of Roman learning and civilisation linked with the higher attractions of Christian devotion; and were able, amid the monastic shades of Vivaria, to enjoy at one and the same time the calm of retirement and the solace of prayer.

The foundation of Cassiodorus took place in the year 540. Eighteen years previously--in 522--the two Roman senators, Equitius and Tertullus, had taken their sons Maurus and Placidus to the grotto of Subiaco, and committed them to the care of a solitary named Benedict. Maurus was twelve years old and Placidus seven, and they were soon joined by other children of the same age. They were humble beginnings indeed of a mighty edifice, the first fruits of the Benedictine schools.[35] In 543 St. Maurus carried the rule of St. Benedict into Gaul, where monasteries soon multiplied, in which were cultivated letters both sacred and profane.[36] But they were not the earliest monastic schools which had sprung up on the Gallican soil. I need not here remind the reader of that famous abbey of Marmoutier, erected by St. Martin of Tours in the fourth century, and formed on the model of those episcopal monasteries founded by St. Eusebius of Vercelli and St. Ambrose of Milan. Yet more celebrated, and more closely associated with the history of letters in our own country, was the school of Lerins, a rocky isle off the coast of Gaul, where, about the year 400, St. Honoratus fixed his abode, peopling it with a race of monks who united the labours of the scholar to the penitential practices of the recluse. Its rule, though strictly monastic, aimed at making its disciples apostolic men, “thoroughly furnished to all good works.” Hence the brethren were not required to renounce the pursuit of letters. St. Honoratus himself did not disdain the flowers of eloquence, and the sweetness of his style drew from St. Eucher the graceful remark, that “he restored the honey to the wax.”[37] St. Hilary of Arles, another of the Lerins scholars, is represented by his biographer sitting among his clergy with a table before him, whereon lay his book and the materials of his manual work, and while his fingers were busy making nets, dictating to a cleric, who took down his notes in shorthand. It would take us too long to enumerate the distinguished prelates who were sent forth from the school of Lerins during the sixth century. The names of St. Cesarius of Arles and St. Vincent of Lerins; of Salvian, the master of bishops as he was called; of St. Eucher, the purity of whose Latin eloquence even Erasmus has praised; and of St. Lupus of Troyes, whom Sidonius Apollinaris hesitated not to call the first bishop in the Christian world--may suffice to show what sort of scholars were produced by this holy congregation.

Such then was the state of letters at the opening of the sixth century, an epoch when Europe was covered with the shattered remains of an expiring civilisation, and when whatever literary activity lingered about the old academies of Italy and Gaul must be regarded as the parting rays of a light, fast sinking below the horizon. Yet, as it sank, another luminary was sending forth its rising beams, and the essentially Christian institution of the monastic schools was acquiring shape and solidity. Such an epoch stood in need of a master to harmonise its disordered elements, and such a master it found in St. Gregory. But before speaking of him and of his Anglo-Saxon converts we must glance at the state of letters among that earlier Celtic population which sent students from Britain to the schools of Rome in the days of St. Jerome and St. Damasus. Nor whilst doing so, can we forget that sister-isle which never felt the tread of the Roman legions, and which, sharing with Britain the glorious title of the “Isle of Saints,” merited by its extraordinary devotion to learning to be designated also the “Isle of Scholars.”

_CHAPTER II._

SCHOOLS OF BRITAIN AND IRELAND.

A.D. 380 TO 590.

Although the monastic institute existed in Britain almost from the period of her first conversion to the faith, yet the seminaries which produced her most illustrious scholars were only founded at a comparatively later date. Whatever schools may have existed in connection with the British episcopal monasteries of earlier times, had fallen into decay by the beginning of the fifth century, when fresh foundations of learning began to spring up, the origin of which must be traced to three distinct sources. I say _three_ distinct sources, because the apostolic labours of St. Ninian among the Picts, of St. Palladius in North Britain, and of St. Germanus and St. Lupus in the southern portion of the island, were undertaken among different races, and on different occasions; nevertheless, in reality these three streams flowed forth from one common fountain, which was no other than the Holy and Apostolic See of Rome.

The mission of St. Ninian was the first in order of time. The son of a petty prince of Cumberland, he travelled to Rome for the purpose of study, about the year 380, and being introduced to the notice of Pope Damasus, was placed by him under the care of teachers, and in all probability received into the school of the Patriarchium. There he was thoroughly instructed, _regulariter edoctus_, in all the mysteries of the faith, and after spending fifteen years in Rome he at last received consecration from the hands of Pope St. Siricius, by whom he was sent back to exercise the episcopal functions in his own country. The fifth century, which was then just opening, was precisely that in which the discipline of the Church received its fullest development. Ninian, who had so long studied the ecclesiastical system at its fountain-head, and who on his homeward journey had visited Tours, and conversed with St. Martin, then drawing near his end, was fully prepared to introduce into his northern diocese the rule and manner of life which he had seen carried out in the churches of Italy and Gaul. At Whitherne in Galloway, where he fixed his see, he built a stone church, after the Roman fashion, and lived in a house adjoining it, together with his cathedral clergy, in strict observance of the ecclesiastical canons. In this episcopal college the younger clerics followed their ecclesiastical studies, whilst a school was likewise opened for the children of the neighbourhood, as appears from the anecdote related by St. Ælred of one little rebel who ran away to escape a flogging, and was nearly drowned when attempting to put to sea in a coracle, or wicker boat, which chanced to be without its usual covering of hides.[38] The great school, as St. Ninian’s seminary is often styled, was resorted to both by British and Irish scholars, and among the works left written by the founder was a Book of Sentences, or selections from the Fathers, which seems to have been intended for the use of his students.

The death of Ninian took place at the time when the churches of South Britain were suffering from the ravages of the Pelagian heresy. Pelagius, himself a Briton by birth, had nowhere found more ready recipients of his doctrines than among his own countrymen, and the infection spread with such alarming rapidity that at the solicitation of Palladius, deacon of the Church of Rome, Pope St. Celestine commissioned the two Gallican bishops, St. Germanus of Auxerre and St. Lupus of Troyes, to visit Britain in the quality of Papal legates, and take the necessary steps for putting a stop to the troubles caused by the heretics. Their first visit took place in 429, on which occasion they introduced many reforms of discipline. One of the chief measures which they adopted in order to check the progress of error was the foundation of schools of learning both for clergy and laity. At Caerleon, then the British capital, they themselves began the good work by lecturing on the Holy Scriptures and the liberal arts. Their scholars appear to have done them credit, for some, we read, became profound astronomers, able to observe the course of the stars and to foretell prodigies (that is, to calculate eclipses), whilst others wholly devoted themselves to the study of the Scriptures.

Under these disciples a vast number of monastic schools soon sprang up in various parts of Britain. Indeed so undoubted is the claim of Germanus to be considered as the founder of the ancient British colleges, that some imaginative writers have assigned to him the origin of our two Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. His most celebrated followers were Dubricius and Iltutus, the first of whom established two great schools of sacred letters on the banks of the Wye, one of which, situated at Hentland, was attended by a thousand students. But this was surpassed by the monastery of Lantwit in Glamorganshire, where St. Iltutus presided over a community of two thousand four hundred members, including many scholars of note, such as the historian Gildas, the bard Taliesin, and the famous prelates, St. Sampson and St. Paul of Leon. Here, according to the Triads, the praises of God never ceased, but one hundred monks were employed each hour in chanting the divine office, which was kept up both by day and night. Iltutus was also the founder, or restorer, of the school of Bangor on the Dee, where had been a college of Christian philosophers in the days of King Lucius, and where, according to Bede, there were seven houses or colleges, each containing, at least, three hundred students; and this, says William of Malmesbury, “we may well believe by what we see; for so many half-ruined walls of churches, so many windings of porticoes, and so great a heap of ruins you may scarce see elsewhere.”

Another Bangor, the same that still retains the name which was indeed common to all these foundations, owed its origin to Daniel, the fellow disciple of St. Iltutus, who, we are assured, received under his care all the most hopeful youths of West Britain. Paulinus, one of his scholars, founded the college of the White House, in Caermarthenshire, afterwards known as Whitland Abbey, or Alba Landa; receiving among other pupils St. David, who began his studies at Bangor under Iltutus. This celebrated man, whose name in our days is often regarded as almost as legendary as that of his contemporary, King Arthur, completed the extirpation of the Pelagian heresy, and by his apostolic labours merited the title bestowed on him by British historians of “the father of his country.” He was the founder of no fewer than twelve monasteries, in all of which he contrived to combine the hard work of the scholar and the equally hard labour of the monk. Ploughing and grammar-learning succeeded each other by turns. “Knowing,” says Capgrave, “that secure rest is the nourisher of all vices, he subjected the shoulders of his monks to hard wearisomeness.... They detested riches, and they had no cattle to till their ground, but each one was instead of an ox to himself and his brethren. When they had done their field-work, returning to the cloisters of their monastery, they spent the rest of the day till evening in reading and writing. And in the evening at the sound of the bell, presently laying aside their work, and leaving even a letter unfinished, they went to the church and remained there till the stars appeared, and then all went together to table to eat, but not to fulness. Their food was bread with roots or herbs, seasoned with salt, and they quenched their thirst with milk mingled with water. Supper being ended they persevered about three hours in watching, prayer, and genuflections. After this they went to rest, and at cock-crowing rose again, and abode in prayer till the dawn of day. Their only clothing was the skins of beasts.” Yet these austere cœnobites cultivated all the liberal arts, and the monastery of the Rosy Valley, near Menevia, founded in the year 519, was no less a school of polite learning than it was a nursery of saints.

To St. Dubricius, St. Daniel, and St. David, the three dioceses of Llandaff, Bangor, and Menevia owe their origin; the fourth of the ancient sees, that of St. Asaph, sprang out of a monastic foundation which must be traced to a different source. It has been already said that the mission of St. Germanus and St. Lupus had been conferred on them by St. Celestine at the solicitation of the deacon Palladius, who by some writers is said to have been himself a Briton by birth. However that may be, his interest in the affairs of our northern islands induced St. Celestine, in the year 430, to send him to Ireland, after having first consecrated him bishop “over the Scots believing in Christ.” The Christian faith had, in fact, already penetrated into Ireland, either from Gaul or Britain, but the faithful were as yet few in number, and possessed no regular hierarchy. Palladius at first met with such success, that St. Prosper, in his book against Cassian, written about this time, was able to say that St. Celestine, after preserving the _Roman_ island Catholic, had made the _barbarous_ island Christian. He baptized many persons, and erected three churches in which he deposited the sacred books, some relics of SS. Peter and Paul, and his own writing-tablets. But soon afterwards the hostility of the native princes obliged him to withdraw from the country, in order not to expose his followers to persecution. As his mission was to the Scottish people, and not to any particular province or kingdom, he crossed over to North Britain, where several colonies of the Scots had already settled, and there pursued his apostolic labours with more prosperous results. His subsequent history is differently related by different authors. Some represent him as surviving for many years, and firmly establishing the ecclesiastical discipline of the North British Church. Others, with more appearance of probability, represent his death as taking place very shortly after his arrival in Scotland. It is certain, however, that regular discipline was established by him among his clergy, and that episcopal colleges were founded either by him or his immediate successors, in which young children were received and trained for the ecclesiastical state. Here the Scottish Christians of Hibernia would naturally repair, before the establishment of similar seminaries had begun in their own island, and among those who acquired the first seeds of learning in the Bishop’s school was Cœlius Sedulius, whose Irish name is said to have been Sheil. His history is obscure, but, according to Trithemius, he passed over from Ireland into Britain about the year 430, and afterwards perfected his studies in the best schools of Gaul and Italy. Having embraced the ecclesiastical state, he thenceforward devoted himself exclusively to sacred letters; but his “Carmen Paschale,” a Latin poem on the life of our Lord, betrays his familiarity with the poetry of Virgil. From another smaller poem on the same subject are taken two of the hymns used by the Church on the festivals of Christmas and the Epiphany.[39] St. Servanus, the first bishop of Orkney, is represented by some as a disciple of St. Palladius, but it is probable that he lived some years later. He was the founder of the monastery of Culross, where he brought up many youths from childhood, and educated them for the sacred ministry. Among these was one named Kentigern, so beautiful in person, and so innocent in manners, that his companions bestowed on him the title of _Mungo_, or the dearly beloved, by which name he is still best known in Scotland. When only twenty-five years of age the people demanded him for their bishop; he was accordingly consecrated by an Irish prelate, and chose for his residence a certain solitary place at the mouth of the river Clyde, the site of the present city of Glasgow. Here he erected a church and monastery, where he lived with his clergy according to the apostolic rule, his diocese extending from the Atlantic to the shores of the German Ocean; and over its vast extent he constantly journeyed on foot, preaching and administering baptism. The throne of the Scottish prince Rydderch the Liberal having been seized by one of his rebellious nobles, St. Kentigern was forced by the usurper to quit the country, and took refuge in Wales, where, after visiting St. David at Menevia, he received from one of the Welsh princes a grant of the tract of land lying between the rivers Elwy and Clywd, where he erected the monastery and school of Llan-Elwy. Local tradition affirms that the name of Clywd was bestowed by him on the stream that bounded his domain, in memory of his old home on the banks of the Clyde. Here he was joined by a great number of followers, among whom he established regular monastic discipline. His rule, however, had some peculiarities in it. He divided his community into three companies, two of them, who were unlearned, were employed in agriculture and the domestic offices, the third, which was formed of the learned, devoted their time to study and apostolic labours; and this last class numbered upwards of three hundred. These again were divided into two choirs, one of whom entered the church as the others left, so that the praises of God at all hours resounded in their mouths. From this college a great number of apostolic missionaries went forth, not only into different parts of Britain, but also to Norway, Iceland, and the Orkney Islands St. Kentigern himself continued to journey about, preaching the faith, silencing the Pelagian heretics, and founding churches. On the restoration of Rydderch, in 544, St. Kentigern was recalled to his see, and left the government of his monastery and school at Llan-Elwy to St. Asaph, his favourite scholar, whose name was afterwards conferred upon the church and diocese.

One other British school must be named before passing on to the nurseries of sacred science established in the sister isle, it is that of Llancarvan, whose founder was indeed a British saint and prince, but one who had received his early education in the seminary of an Irish recluse. Few names in the ecclesiastical annals of Britain are more illustrious than that of St. Cadoc; the son of a prince of Brecknockshire, he was placed at the age of seven years under the care of Tathai, an Irish teacher, who had been induced to leave his mountain hermitage, and to take the government of the monastic college of Gwent in Monmouthshire. There Cadoc spent twelve years, studying the liberal arts and the Divine Scriptures. The times were simple, and the habits of the Irish doctor, as he is called, were somewhat austere. The young prince lighted his master’s fire and cooked his frugal repast, whilst in the interval of such homely duties he conned his Latin grammar, and construed Virgil. This sort of school discipline, however, far from disgusting him with learning, inspired him with such a passion for letters, that when his father retired from the world to embrace an eremitical life, Cadoc would not accept of the dignity of chief thus left vacant, but chose to travel to various schools in Britain and Ireland, in order to perfect his studies. At last he fixed on a rural solitude in Glamorganshire, about three miles from the present town of Cowbridge, and there laid the foundation of a church and monastery, which became one of the most famous of all the British schools. It obtained the name of Llancarvan, or the Church of the Stags, because, according to the ancient legend, whilst it was in course of building, some stags from the neighbouring forest, forgetting their natural wildness, came and offered themselves to the service of the saint, suffering him to yoke them to the cart which two weary or discontented monks had refused to draw.

Gildas the Wise, the pupil of St. Iltutus, was invited by Cadoc to deliver lectures in his college, which he did for the space of one year, desiring no other stipend than the prayers of his scholars; and during this time, says John of Tinmouth, he with his own hand copied out a book of the Gospels long preserved in the monastery of Llancarvan. At last the troubles caused by the advancing arms of “the dragons of Germany,” as the Saxons were sometimes termed, obliged Cadoc and Gildas to quit Llancarvan, and take refuge in some small islands lying at the mouth of the Severn called the Holmes. Tradition still points to the Steep Holmes as the place of their retreat; and the wild peony and onion, which blossom there in profusion, but are not to be found on any part of the neighbouring coast, are commonly said to have sprung from those which grew in the garden of Gildas. He did not, however, long remain there, but in company with Cadoc joined some bands of British emigrant who had crossed over to Armorica. The two saints chose for their residence a cave in the little island of Ronech, where their fame attracted a crowd of disciples, who were accustomed twice a day to pass over from the mainland in little boats in order to enjoy their instruction. Cadoc was touched by their perseverance, and at last employed his mechanical genius in the contrivance of a bridge for their use, and did not refuse to deal out to them the bread of science. He made them learn Virgil by heart as well as the Scriptures; indeed his love for the old Mantuan was so enthusiastic that he generally carried the Æneid under his arm, and was accustomed to express his regrets to Gildas that one who on earth had sung so sweetly should be for ever shut out from the joys of heaven. St. Cadoc is said by some to have returned to Britain and found a martyr’s crown at the hands of the pagan Saxons. According to the Glastonbury historians, St. Gildas also returned to his own country, and lies buried among the unnumbered saints of the isle of Avalon.

We have now to turn to the shores of that island which, if termed barbarous by St. Prosper from the circumstance of its never having formed any portion of the Roman Empire, was soon to become the means of enlightening many a land of more ancient civilisation. The history of the mission of St. Patrick has found too many narrators to need repetition in this place, and we shall only advert therefore to such points as have a particular interest in connection with the Irish schools. Whatever disputes have arisen as to the birthplace of St. Patrick, there has never been any difference of opinion as to the sources whence he derived his education. It seems certain that after his return from his second captivity in Ireland he studied for four years at Tours under St. Martin, whose nephew he is commonly said to have been; after which, in the thirtieth year of his age--that is to say, about the year 418--he placed himself under the direction of St. Germanus of Auxerre, with whom he continued his studies. Hence in the hymn attributed to Fiech it is said of him that “he read his canons under Germanus.” The chronology of the next twelve years of his life is exceedingly confused, but he is stated to have been sent by Germanus to study in an island in the Mediterranean Sea, _in mari Tyrrheno_, which was evidently Lerins. Nennius adds that he also visited Rome, and spent nearly eight years there, “reading and searching into the mysteries of God, and studying the books of Holy Scripture.” The length of time spent by him in Rome appears uncertain, but most writers agree on the point of his having visited the city, and of his being _Romanis eruditus disciplinis_. Having returned to Germanus, he is said to have accompanied him in his first visit to Britain, and was afterwards sent back to Rome by that holy prelate, who recommended him to Pope St. Celestine as a fit person to be employed in the Irish mission. The endless differences to be found in the various versions of his life do not affect the main facts here established, namely, that he acquired his ecclesiastical training in the first schools then existing in Christendom--those of Tours Auxerre, Lerins, and Rome--and that his institution to the apostolic office was received from the hands of the Vicar of Christ.