“Whence many rivulets have since been turned,
O’er the garden Catholic to lead
Their living waters, and have fed its plants.”
The schools founded at Oxford and Cambridge in the IXth and Xth centuries had in the XIIth grown to be universities. At Oxford there were thirty thousand, at Paris twenty-five thousand, and at Padua twenty thousand students. Scattered over Europe at the time Luther raised his voice against the church were sixty six universities.
“Time went on,” says Dr. Newman, speaking of the mediæval universities; “a new state of things, intellectual and social, came in; the church was girt with temporal power; the preachers of S. Dominic were in the ascendant: now, at length, we may ask with curious interest, did the church alter her ancient rule of action, and proscribe intellectual activity? Just the contrary; this is the very age of universities; it is the classical period of the schoolmen; it is the splendid and palmary instance of the wise policy and large liberality of the church, as regards philosophical inquiry. If there ever was a time when the intellect went wild, and had a licentious revel, it was at the date I speak of. When was there ever a more curious, more meddling, bolder, keener, more penetrating, more rationalistic exercise of the reason than at that time? What class of questions did that subtle metaphysical spirit not scrutinize? What premise was allowed without examination? What principle was not traced to its first origin, and exhibited in its most naked shape?… Well, I repeat, here was something which came somewhat nearer to theology than physical research comes; Aristotle was a somewhat more serious foe then, beyond all mistake, than Bacon has been since. Did the church take a high hand with philosophy then? No, not though that philosophy was metaphysical. It was a time when she had temporal power, and could have exterminated the spirit of inquiry with fire and sword; but she determined to put it down by argument; she said: ‘Two can play at that, and my argument is the better.’ She sent her controversialists into the philosophical arena. It was the Dominican and Franciscan doctors, the greatest of them being S. Thomas, who in those mediæval universities fought the battle of revelation with the weapons of heathenism.”[249]
To find fault with the church because popular education in the middle ages was not organized and general as it has since become would be as wise as to pick a quarrel with the ancient Greeks for not having railroads, or with the Romans because they had no steamships. Reading and writing were not taught then universally as they are now because it was physically and morally impossible that they should have been. Without steam and the printing-press, common-school systems would not now be practicable, nor would the want of them be felt. We have great reason to be thankful that the art of printing was invented and America discovered before Luther burned the Pope’s bull, else we should be continually bothered with refuting the cause-and-effect historians who would have infallibly traced both these events to the Wittenberg conflagration.
All Europe was still Catholic when gunpowder drove old Father Schwarz’s pestle through the ceiling, when Gutenberg made his printing-press, when Columbus landed in the New World; and these are the forces which have battered down the castles of feudalism, have brought knowledge within the reach of all, and some measure of redress to the masses of the Old World, by affording them the possibility and opportunity of liberty in the New. These forces would have wrought to even better purpose had Protestantism not broken the continuity and homogeneity of Christian civilization. The Turk would not rest like a blight from heaven upon the fairest lands of Europe and Asia, nor the darkness of heathenism upon India and China, had the civilized nations remained of one faith; and thus, though our own train might have rushed less rapidly down the ringing grooves of change, the whole human race would have advanced to a level which there now seems but little reason to hope it will ever reach.
But to come more nearly to M. de Laveleye’s assertion that the Protestant states are incomparably more advanced than the Catholic, with the exception of England, which in this matter is at least up to the standard of Catholic countries. In the report of the Commissioner of Education for 1874 there is a statistical account of the state of education in foreign countries which throws some light upon this subject.
The school attendance, compared with the population, is in Austria as 1 to 10; in Belgium, as 1 to 10½; in Ireland, as 1 to 16; in Catholic Switzerland, as 1 to 16; in England, as 1 to 17. In Bavaria it is as 1 to 7, upon the authority of Kay, in his Social Condition of the People in England and Europe. Catholic Austria, Bavaria, Belgium, and Ireland have proportionately a larger school attendance than Protestant England. England and Wales (report of 1874), with a population of 22,712,266, had a school population of 5,374,700, of whom only about half were registered, and not half of these attended with sufficient regularity to bring grants to their schools. Ireland, with a population of 5,411,416, had on register 1,006,511, or nearly half as many as England and Wales, though her population is not a fourth of that of these two countries. “The statistical fact,” says Laing, speaking of Rome as it was under the popes, “that Rome has above a hundred schools more than Berlin, for a population little more than half that of Berlin, puts to flight a world of humbug about systems of national education carried on by governments and their moral effects on society.… In Catholic Germany, in France, Italy, and even Spain, the education of the common people in reading, writing, arithmetic, music, manners, and morals, is at least as generally diffused and as faithfully promoted by the clerical body as in Scotland. It is by their own advance, and not by keeping back the advance of the people, that the popish (sic) priesthood of the present day seek to keep ahead of the intellectual progress of the community in Catholic lands; and they might, perhaps, retort on our Presbyterian clergy, and ask if they, too, are in their countries at the head of the intellectual movement of the age. Education is in reality not only not repressed, but is encouraged, by the popish church, and is a mighty instrument in its hands, and ably used.”[250]
Professor Huxley’s testimony is confirmatory of this admission of Laing. “It was my fortune,” he says, “some time ago to pay a visit to one of the most important of the institutions in which the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church in these islands are trained; and it seemed to me that the difference between these men and the comfortable champions of Anglicanism and Dissent was comparable to the difference between our gallant Volunteers and the trained veterans of Napoleon’s Old Guard. The Catholic priest is trained to know his business and do it effectually. The professors of the college in question, learned, zealous, and determined men, permitted me to speak frankly with them. We talked like outposts of opposed armies during a truce—as friendly enemies; and when I ventured to point out the difficulties their students would have to encounter from scientific thought, they replied: ‘Our church has lasted many ages, and has passed safely through many storms. The present is but a new gust of the old tempest; and we do not turn out our young men less fitted to weather it than they have been in former times to cope with the difficulties of those times.’”[251]