d the school was still strictly under the
control of the Church, acting now as the delegate of the temporal ruler,
and in each country a whole body of teaching and discipline was evolved,
the result of which was a fundamental difference in the attitude of
mind. The English bishops, the German consistories, the Scotch
presbytery, set their seal on the schools, as much as did the Jesuits
and Port Royal in France. The Shorter Catechism, the English Prayer
Book, the German hymns, each gave a distinct character to the religions
of the country, and this character was the basis of the teaching in the
schools.

Religion, which had been the great unifier, became the chief engine of
separation.

Equally important was the growth of national literature. This indeed
goes back far beyond the sixteenth century, but none the less it is from
this time that the writers not only of imagination, but also of
learning, began to express themselves each in his own vernacular. Sir
Thomas More, it is true, wrote his _Utopia_ in Latin, but it was in
English that it had its great circulation. Bacon used both languages,
but it is on English editions of his works that his fame chiefly rests.
In particular we find that works on religion and theology are now
produced not only in Latin, but one hundred years before Hooker would
have discoursed on 'ecclesiastical polity' in the learned language, and
Pascal would never have thought of using French for discussing the
philosophy of the Jesuits.

The influence of these changes upon the school is remarkable. Strictly
speaking, for many generations they seemed to have little immediate
effect upon it. In every country in Europe Latin remained both the
subject and the vehicle of higher education, but it is just for this
reason that we find that, during the seventeenth century and the greater
part of the eighteenth, the schools are more and more falling out of
touch with the intellectual life of the times. They continued in the old
way; for them Shakespeare and Milton, Montaigne and Moliere, Cervantes
and Tasso, seemed to have written in vain. They maintained the form of
an older period, but they had lost the spirit by which it had been
inspired. Their learning remained purely classical; but even though the
new national literature was long in winning for itself a definite place
in the recognized school system, the growth of this literature and the
evolution of national consciousness of which it was a part cou