Beneficiary Education [pp. 236-264]

244 BENEFICIARY EDUCATION. [ApriI~
ages, taught three kinds of free and charity schools, the parochial, the cloistral, and the cath,edral schools, the latter confined
to the training of priests under the immediate supervision 0~
the bishop. Several of the religious orders devoted themselves
chiefly to teaching the young.
Alfred, claimed by many historians as the wisest and greatest
prince that ever ruled England, less than a century later did in
England what Charlemagne had done in France and the Empire of the West. But to make a more general statement of
facts, twice, as history shows, has the Roman Church used this
engine of eleemosynary education to batter down the rising
walls of pure Christianity.
Shortly after the establishment of Christianity by Constantine in the Roman empire, Julian, the apostate, ascended the
throne. Among the measures of impiety he devised to arrest
the progress of the Gospel, this was prominent: he prohibited
Christian support and Christian teaching in the public schools.
Gibbon thus describes the dark policy of this arch-apostate:
"As soon as the resignation of the more obstinate teachers
had established the unrivaled dominion of the pagan sophists,
Julian invited the rising generation to resort with freedom to
the public schools, in a just confidence that their tender minds
would receive the impressions of literature and idolatry.
Julian had reason to expect that, in the space of a few years,
the church would relapse into its primeval simplicity, and that
the theologians who possessed an adequate share of the learning
and eloquence of the age, would be succeeded by a generation
of blind and ignorant fanatics, incapable of defending the truth
of their own principles, or of exposing the various policies of
polytheism."
Nearly twelve centuries later, when Christianity began again
in the Reformation to show its ancient glories (and went on
the wings of the wind from nation to nation, conquering and
to conquer), the same game was sought to be played once
more. NUt now by Julian, but by those filled with the spirit
of Julian-the Jesuits.
Ranke, in his History of M~c Popcs, thus describes their work:
The Jesuits labored at the improvement of the universities, and in a short
time they had among them teachers who might claim to be ranked as the
restorers of classical learning. They devoted an equal assiduity to the direc