To speak the strongest reason in his own.”[9]
§ 11. One of the scholars of the Renascence, Hieronymus Wolf, was wise enough to see that there might be no small merit in a boy’s silence: “Nec minima pueri virtus est tacere cum recte loqui nesciat” (Quoted by Parker). But this virtue of silence was not encouraged by Sturm, and he determined that by the age of sixteen his pupils should have a fair command of expression in Latin and some knowledge of Greek.[10] Latin indeed was to supplant the mother tongue, and boys were to be severely punished for using their own language. By this we may judge of the pernicious effects of following Sturm. And it is a mistake to suppose that the unwisdom of tilting at the vernacular was not so much Sturm’s, as of the age in which he lived. The typical English schoolmaster of the century, Mulcaster, was in this and many other ways greatly in advance of Sturm. To him it was plain that we should “care for that most which we ever use most, because we need it most.”[11] The only need recognized by Sturm was need of the classical languages. Thus he and his admirers led the unlucky schoolboy straight into that “slough of Despond”—verbalism, in which he has struggled ever since;
“Plunged for some sense, but found no bottom there,
So learned and floundered on in mere despair.”[12]
IV.
SCHOOLS OF THE JESUITS.
§ 1. Since the Revival of Learning, no body of men has played so prominent a part in education as the Jesuits. With characteristic sagacity and energy they soon seized on education as a stepping-stone to power and influence; and with their talent for organization, they framed a system of schools which drove all important competitors from the field, and made Jesuits the instructors of Catholic, and even, to some extent, of Protestant Europe. Their skill in this capacity is attested by the highest authorities, by Bacon[13] and by Descartes, the latter of whom had himself been their pupil; and it naturally met with its reward: for more than one hundred years nearly all the foremost men throughout Christendom, both among the clergy and laity, had received the Jesuit training, and in most cases retained for life an attachment to their old masters.