A recent and famous circular respecting the education of women has called attention to the public schools of France, and the revolutionary journals have unanimously profited by the opportunity to load past ages with sarcasm and irony. It is because there is a question of religion in this case, as in all the principal incidents of the time. The antichristian press is but little interested in the degree of knowledge diffused in the middle ages, or in the pretended degradation of the people of Rome; [Footnote 177] but under these deceitful pretexts is concealed a design, persistently and ardently pursued—the annihilation of Christianity. Christianity must be put down because it is now the only force that strongly resists unruly passions, and because modern barbarians, eager to possess the goods they covet, wish to submit no longer to any obstacle or delay.
[Footnote 177: The degradation of which an editor of the Journal des Débats (M. J. Janin) wrote in 1836: "Talk to me of the enslaved country of the Holy Father as free!">[
Let not Christians be deceived by the hypocritical protestations of respect uttered by this enemy, to whom falsehood is a jest. Let them not grow weary of countermining the subterranean attacks carried on against the city. For each assault let there be a sortie; for each new battery, a new bastion! Resources are not wanting; we possess facts, works, men, the testimony of history, and even the admission of our enemies, and we are sure victory will be ours in the end.
A former essay [Footnote 178] depicted the savage brutality of the barbarous nations converted to Christianity, their passions, their vices, their ferocity, and their excesses. We will now show what the church did in one particular to subdue, civilize, and elevate them, by diffusing with unparalleled munificence the most extended, the most general and complete course of instruction ever given to the world; how, in the most troublous times—in the tenth century, for example—the church was the inviolable guardian of the productions of the human mind; what ardor for knowledge it excited in these men, but recently so violent and so material; and besides its saints, what learned men, it formed—what great men, full of talent and genius!
[Footnote 178: "Les Barbares et le Moyen Age," Revue du Monde Cath., of Aug. 10 and Sept. 10, 1867.]
I.
Christian Antiquity.
Some writers, having lost the spirit of Christianity, have denied that Christian antiquity had a taste for science and literature, and have stigmatized the middle ages as dark. If they had been Christians, they would have known that this accusation is as erroneous as it is injurious—was contrary to the very principles of Christianity.
Pagan society, established, with a view to this life, for the well-being of a few, kept the people in ignorance in order to keep them in servitude. Ignorance, by rendering men material, disposes them to servility and strengthens tyranny. It had academies for the free-born, but not for the slave. Why trouble themselves about the minds of those miserable creatures who were "incapable of good, of evil, and of virtue," who were called speaking instruments and chattels? It had philosophers, poets, and learned men, but no popular schools; for it loved science and not man.
The first principle of Christianity, on the contrary, is love. Love is without narrowness: it does not repel, it attracts: it is not exclusive, it is all-embracing: it seeketh not its own, it is generously and openly diffusive, it searches out and summons the whole world: Venite ad me omnes. Christianity knows only one race of men who are all equal. Its other name is Catholicism, universality. It has but one object, which is supernatural—to lead men to God.