ety. That which I presume we are searching for is a more
fundamental, spiritual, and intellectual unity--internal not external;
not a painted and stucco resemblance, but a unity of origin and of life.

Let us see what we can learn from history.

The history of European education is centred round two institutions, the
School and the University. Both have their origin in the remote past,
and both have maintained themselves with singular fidelity to their
original type.

The School goes back to the very origin of our civilization; if we are
to understand its nature, we must transfer ourselves in thought to those
early days when the first missionaries planted in the Somerset valleys
and on the stern Northumberland coast the Cross of Christ. They came to
a people still on the verge of barbarism, with a language still unformed
by literature, with a religion that gave no clue to the mysteries of
life by which they were oppressed. They came to these men full of the
enthusiasm of the Gospel--coming not only as teachers of religion, but
as the apostles of a higher civilization, for they had behind them the
awful name of Rome.

Wherever they came, among their first duties was to found schools in
which to train men who would succeed them; we must always remember that
the education which they gave had one supreme object--it was to bring up
the boys of the rude and barbarous communities in which they found
themselves, to become teachers and servants of the Church. The substance
of the teaching was always the same, whether in Spain, in Gaul, in
Ireland or in Britain; it was the Bible, the services of the Church, and
the writings of the Fathers. It was by the school that the boys were
initiated into the common system of Western Christendom, and were made
citizens of the greater world the centre of which was in Rome.

But if the substance and the object was identical throughout Europe, so
always was the form in which the teaching was given; at a time when all
learning and all religion came from Rome, the foundation of knowledge
was the Latin tongue. In these early days was established the tradition
that still subsists; the gateway to learning and to culture lay by the
narrow road of the Latin grammar. The schoolboy who still tells out his
longs and shorts can compare them with the ruder efforts of his Saxon
forefathers thirteen centuries ago. Never have authors attained a fame
and a circulation equal to that of the great grammarians