WORK OF THE CHURCH DURING THE MIDDLE AGES. Everywhere throughout the old Empire, and far into the forest depths of barbarian lands, went bishops, priests, and missionaries, and there parishes were organized, rude churches arose, and the process of educating the fighting tribesmen in the ways of civilized life was carried out. It was not by schools of learning, but by faith and ceremonial that the Church educated and guided her children into the type she approved. Schools for other than monks and clergy for a time were not needed, and such practically died out. The Church and its offices took the place of education and exercised a wholesome and restraining influence over both young and old throughout the long period of the Middle Ages. These the Church in time taught the barbarian to respect. The great educational work of the Church during this period of insecurity and ignorance has seldom been better stated than in the following words by Draper:
Of the great ecclesiastics, many had risen from the humblest ranks of society, and these men, true to their democratic instincts, were often found to be the inflexible supporters of right against might. Eventually coming to be the depositaries of the knowledge that then existed, they opposed intellect to brute force, in many instances successfully, and by the example of the organization of the Church, which was essentially republican, they showed how representative systems may be introduced into the State. Nor was it over communities and nations that the Church displayed her chief power. Never in the world before was there such a system. From her central seat at Rome, her all-seeing eye, like that of Providence itself, could equally take in a hemisphere at a glance, or examine the private life of any individual. Her boundless influences enveloped kings in their palaces, and relieved the beggar at the monastery gate. In all Europe there was not a man too obscure, too insignificant, or too desolate for her. Surrounded by her solemnities, every one received his name at her altar; her bells chimed at his marriage, her knell tolled at his funeral. She extorted from him the secrets of his life at her confessionals, and punished his faults by her penances. In his hour of sickness and trouble her servants sought him out, teaching him, by her exquisite litanies and prayers, to place his reliance on God, or strengthening him for the trials of life by the example of the holy and just. Her prayers had an efficacy to give repose to the souls of his dead. When, even to his friends, his lifeless body had become an offense, in the name of God she received it into her consecrated ground, and under her shadow he rested till the great reckoning-day. From little better than a slave she raised his wife to be his equal, and, forbidding him to have more than one, met her recompense for those noble deeds in a firm friend at every fireside. Discountenancing all impure love, she put round that fireside the children of one mother, and made that mother little less than sacred in their eyes. In ages of lawlessness and rapine, among people but a step above savages, she vindicated the inviolability of her precincts against the hand of power, and made her temples a refuge and sanctuary for the despairing and oppressed. Truly she was the shadow of a great rock in many a weary land. [12.]
THE CIVILIZING WORK OF THE MONASTERIES. No less important than the Church and its clergy was the work of the monasteries and their monks in building up a basis for a new civilization. These, too, were founded all over Europe. To make a map of western Europe showing the monasteries established by 800 A.D. would be to cover the map with a series of dots. [13] The importance of their work is better understood when we remember that the Germans had never lived in cities, and did not settle in them on entering the Empire. The monasteries, too, were seldom established in towns. Their sites were in the river valleys and in the forests (R. 69), and the monks became the pioneers in clearing the land and preparing the way for agriculture and civilization. Not infrequently a swamp was taken and drained. The Middle-Age period was essentially a period of settlement of the land and of agricultural development, and the monks lived on the land and among a people just passing through the earliest stages of settled and civilized life. In a way the inheritors of the agricultural and handicraft knowledge of the Romans, the monks became the most skillful artisans and farmers to be found, and from them these arts in time reached the developing peasantry around them. Their work and services have been well summed up by the same author just quoted, as follows:
It was mainly by the monasteries that to the peasant class of Europe was pointed out the way of civilization. The devotions and charities; the austerities of the brethren; their abstemious meal; their meager clothing, the cheapest of the country in which they lived; their shaven heads, or the cowl which shut out the sight of sinful objects; the long staff in their hands; their naked feet and legs; their passing forth on their journeys by twos, each a watch on his brother; the prohibitions against eating outside of the wall of the monastery, which had its own mill, its own bakehouse, and whatever was needed in an abstemious domestic economy (Figure 38); their silent hospitality to the wayfarer, who was refreshed in a separate apartment; the lands around their buildings turned from a wilderness into a garden, and, above all, labor exalted and ennobled by their holy hands, and celibacy, forever, in the eye of the vulgar, a proof of separation from the world and a sacrifice to heaven—these were the things that arrested the attention of the barbarians of Europe, and led them on to civilization. [14]
THE PROBLEM FACED BY THE MIDDLE AGES. That the lamp of learning burned low during this period of assimilation is no cause for wonder. Recovery from such a deluge of barbarism on a weakened society is not easy. In fact the recovery was a long and slow process, occupying nearly the whole of a thousand years. The problem which faced the Church, as the sole surviving force capable of exerting any constructive influence, was that of changing the barbarism and anarchy of the sixth century, with its low standards of living and lack of humane ideals, into the intelligent, progressive civilization of the fifteenth century. This was the work of the Middle Ages, and largely the work of the Christian Church. It was not a period of progress, but one of assimilation, so that a common western civilization might in time be developed out of the diverse and hostile elements mixed together by the rude force of circumstances. The enfeebled Roman race was to be reinvigorated by mixture with the youthful and vigorous Germans (R. 50); to the institutions of ancient society were to be added certain social and political institutions of the Germanic peoples; all were to be brought under the rule of a common Christian Church; and finally, when these people had become sufficiently civilized and educated to enable them to understand and appreciate, "nearly every achievement of the Greeks and the Romans in thought, science, law, and the practical arts" was to be recovered and made a part of our western civilization.
In this chapter we have dealt largely with the great fundamental movements which have so deeply influenced the course of human history. In the chapters which immediately follow we shall tell how learning was preserved during the period and what facilities for education actually existed; trace the more important efforts made to reëstablish schools and learning; and finally describe the culmination of the process of absorbing and educating the Germans in the civilization they had conquered that came in the great period of recovery of the ancient learning and civilization—the age of the Renaissance.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Do the peculiar problems of assimilation of the foreign-born, revealed to us by the World War, put us in a somewhat similar position to Rome under the Empire as relates to the need of a guiding national faith?
2. Outline how Rome might have been helped and strengthened by a national school system under state control.
3. Outline how our state school systems could be made much more effective as national instruments by the infusion into their instruction of a strong national faith.