(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 century B.C. Greek education began. The title lost 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 much legere as prælegere, 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 to office. It was sometimes superseded by a sort of congé d’élire from 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 indicating the 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. Its effect 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.