eresy. And so
every attempt at national and local thought was not only suppressed in
education, but fell under the ban of discipline. In Languedoc the
Albigenses ventured the assertion of their independence; Huss in
Bohemia, in England Wyclif. What happened? The Albigenses were
massacred, Huss was burnt, Wyclif was condemned, and his followers
suffered under the new law of heresy.

This system, which had originated as a part of a great spiritual
movement, long outlived its usefulness. It became an intolerable
tyranny. Its effects were to be seen in the teaching of the humblest
grammar school, and every boy who began the study of the Latin grammar
was being initiated into the abstractions or the Scholastic logic. It
became a dead and iron crust by which the mind of man was confined, and
it was the school and the university which were the peculiar
institutions by which this system was maintained. Unity of education
there was, but at what a price had it been won.

One thing had, however, been secured: the common Christian basis of our
modern civilization had been stamped upon the peoples; so long as Europe
remains Europe this cannot be forgotten or obliterated. No nation can
repudiate its own past, and, whether they will or no, all Western
nations are irrevocably bound together by the ties of the home in which
their childhood and youth was passed.

At last the change came: it came in that double revolution which we call
the Renaissance and the Reformation. In considering them we must confine
ourselves as closely as we can to their effect on education.

The revival of learning was essentially an educational movement, it had
from the beginning to do primarily with the school. It had as its object
a complete change both in the subject-matter and in the spirit of
education. Always it drew its inspiration from the literature of Greece,
and this meant the fullest freedom of the human intellect, freedom of
speculation, freedom of inquiry on the conditions of human life, and in
particular it was a revolt from the ascetic ideas of the mediaeval
Church; it was the assertion of the dignity of the body and mind of man.
Now whereas in Italy, its original home, this took a warp definitely
antagonistic to Christian faith and Christian ethics, in Northern Europe
the new classical learning was harmonized with Christianity, and
classical learning was applied to the interpretation of the Bible. It
was the synthesis of what mediaeval Euro