The next great source of our western civilization was the work of Rome. Like the Greeks, the Romans also occupied a peninsula jutting southward into the Mediterranean, but in most respects they were far different in type. Unlike the active, imaginative, artistic, and creative Greeks, the Romans were a practical, concrete, unimaginative, and executive people. Energy, personality, and executive power were in greatest demand among them.
The work of Rome was political, governmental, and legal—not artistic or intellectual. Rome was strong where Greece was weak, and weak where Greece was strong. As a result the two peoples supplemented one another well in laying the foundations for our western civilization. The conquests of Greece were intellectual; those of Rome legal and governmental. Rome absorbed and amalgamated the whole ancient world into one Empire, to which she gave a common language, dress, manners, religion, literature, and political and legal institutions. Adopting Greek learning and educational practices as her own, she spread them throughout the then-known world. By her political organization she so fixed Roman ideas as to law and government throughout the Empire that Christianity built firmly on the Roman foundations, and the German barbarians, who later swept over the Empire, could neither destroy nor obliterate them. The Roman conquest of the world thus decisively influenced the whole course of western history, spread and perpetuated Greek ideas, and ultimately saved the world from a great disaster.
To Rome, then, we are indebted most of all for ideas as to government, and for the introduction of law and order into an unruly world. In all the intervening centuries between ancient Rome and ourselves, and in spite of many wars and repeated onslaughts of barbarism, Roman governmental law still influences and guides our conduct, and this influence is even yet extending to other lands and other peoples. We are also indebted to Rome for many practical skills and for important engineering knowledge, which was saved and passed on to Western Europe through the medium of the monks. On the other side of the picture, the recent great World War, with all its awful destruction of life and property, and injury to the orderly progress of civilization, may be traced directly to the Roman idea of world empire and the sway of one imperial government, imposing its rule and its culture on the rest of mankind.
Into this Roman Empire, united and made one by Roman arms and government, came the first of the modern forces in the ancient world—that of Christianity—the third great foundation element in our western civilization. Embracing in its early development many Greek philosophical ideas, building securely on the Roman governmental organization, and with its new message for a decaying world, Christianity forms the connecting link between the ancient and modern civilizations. Taking the conception of one God which the Jewish tribes of the East had developed, Christianity changed and expanded this in such a way as to make it a dominant idea in the world. Exalting the teachings of the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the future life, and the need for preparation for a hereafter, Christianity introduced a new type of religion and offered a new hope to the poor and oppressed of the ancient world. In so doing a new ethical force of first importance was added to the effective energies of mankind, and a basis for the education of all was laid, for the first time, in the history of the world.
Christianity came at just the right time not only to impart new energy and hopefulness to a decadent ancient civilization, but also to meet, conquer, and in time civilize the barbarian hordes from the North which overwhelmed the Roman Empire. A new and youthful race of German barbarians now appeared upon the scene, with resulting ravage and destruction, and anarchy and ignorance, and long centuries ensued during which ancient civilization fell prey to savage violence and superstition. Progress ceased in the ancient world. The creative power of antiquity seemed exhausted. The digestive and assimilative powers of the old world seemed gone. Greek was forgotten. Latin was corrupted. Knowledge of the arts and sciences was lost. Schools disappeared. Only the Christian Church remained to save civilization from the wreck, and it, too, was almost submerged in the barbaric flood. It took ten centuries partially to civilize, educate, and mould into homogeneous units this heterogeneous horde of new peoples. During this long period it required the strongest energies of the few who understood to preserve the civilization of the past for the enjoyment and use of a modern world.
Yet these barbarian Germans, great as was the havoc they wrought at first, in time contributed much to the stream of our modern civilization. They brought new conceptions of individual worth and freedom into a world thoroughly impregnated with the ancient idea of the dominance of the State over the individual. The popular assembly, an elective king, and an independent and developing system of law were contributions of first importance which these peoples brought. The individual man and not the State was, with them, the important unit in society. In the hands of the Angles and Saxons, particularly, but also among the Celts, Franks, Helvetii, and Belgae, this idea of individual freedom and of the subordination of the State to the individual has borne large fruit in modern times in the self-governing States of France, Switzerland, Belgium, England and the English self-governing dominions, and in the United States of America. After much experimenting it now seems certain that the Anglo- Saxon type of self-government, as developed first in England and further expanded in the United States, seems destined to be the type of government in future to rule the world.
It took Europe almost ten centuries to recover from the effects of the invasion of barbarism which the last two centuries of the Roman Empire witnessed, to save itself a little later from Mohammedan conquest, and to pick up the lost threads of the ancient life and begin again the work of civilization. Finally, however, this was accomplished, largely as a result of the labor of monks and missionaries. The barbarians were in time induced to settle down to an agricultural life, to accept Christianity in name at least, and to yield a more or less grudging obedience to monk and priest that they might thereby escape the torments of a world to come. Slowly the monasteries and the churches, aided here and there by far- sighted kings, worked at the restoration of books and learning, and finally, first in Italy, and later in the nations evolved from the tribes that had raided the Empire, there came a period of awakening and rediscovery which led to the development of the early university foundations, a wonderful revival of ancient learning, a great expansion of men's thoughts, a great religious awakening, a wonderful period of world exploration and discovery, the founding of new nations in new lands, the reawakening of the spirit of scientific inquiry, the rise of the democratic spirit, and the evolution of our modern civilization.
By the end of the eleventh century it was clear that the long battle for the preservation of civilization had been won, but it was not until the fourteenth century that the Revival of Learning in Italy gave clear evidence of the rise of the modern spirit. By the year 1500 much had been accomplished, and the new modern questioning spirit of the Italian Revival was making progress in many directions. Most of the old learning had been recovered; the printing-press had been invented, and was at work multiplying books; the study of Greek and Hebrew had been revived in the western world; trade and commerce had begun; the cities and the universities which had arisen had become centers of a new life; a new sea route to India had been found and was in use; Columbus had discovered a new world; the Church was more tolerant of new ideas than it had been for centuries; and thought was being awakened in the western world to a degree that had not taken place since the days of ancient Rome. The world seemed about ready for rapid advances in many directions, and great progress in learning, education, government, art, commerce, and invention seemed almost within its grasp. Instead, there soon opened the most bitter and vindictive religious conflict the world has ever known; western Christian civilization was torn asunder; a century of religious warfare ensued; and this was followed by other centuries of hatred and intolerance and suspicion awakened by the great conflict.
Still, out of this conflict, though it for a time checked the orderly development of civilization, much important educational progress was ultimately to come. In promulgating the doctrine that the authority of the Bible in religious matters is superior to the authority of the Church, the basis for the elementary school for the masses of the people, and in consequence the education of all, was laid. This meant the creation of an entirely new type of school—the elementary, for the masses, and taught in the native tongue—to supplement the Latin secondary schools which had been an outgrowth of the revival of ancient learning, and the still earlier cathedral and monastery schools of the Church.
The modern elementary vernacular school may then be said to be essentially a product of the Protestant Reformation. This is true in a special sense among those peoples which embraced some form of the Lutheran or Calvinistic faiths. These were the Germans, Moravians, Swedes, Norwegians, Finns, Danes, Dutch, Walloons, Swiss, Scotch, Scotch-Irish, French Huguenots, and the English Puritans. As the Renaissance gave a new emphasis to the development of secondary schools by supplying them with a large amount of new subject-matter and a new motive, so the Reformation movement gave a new motive for the education of children not intended for the service of the State or the Church, and the development of elementary vernacular schools was the result. Only in England, of all the revolting countries, did this Protestant conception as to the necessity of education for salvation fail to take deep root, with the result that elementary education in England awaited the new political and social and industrial impulses of the latter half of the nineteenth century for its real development.