As nations are inscrutably brought within the sacred fold, and inscrutably cast without it, so are they used, while within it, in this way or that, according to the supreme will and for the greater glory of Him, who has brought them into being from some common ancestor, and holds them together by unity of government or by traditionary ideas. One Catholic nation is high in the world, another low; one rises and expands into an Empire, another is ever in the position of subject or even dependent. England and Ireland were, in the darkest age of Christian history, the conservators of sacred and profane knowledge: not, however, for any merit of their own, but according to the good pleasure of their Maker: and, when the time came, in His counsels, for the revival of learning on the Continent, then He dispensed with their ministry, and put them aside. It is a remarkable fact, to which I have already alluded, that the appearance of the Danes off the coasts of England and Ireland, the destroyers in both islands of religion and science, synchronizes with the rise of Charlemagne, the founder of modern civilization.
Christianity, which hitherto might be considered as a quality superinduced upon the face of society, now became the element, out of which society grew into shape and reached its stature. The Church had battled with the Roman Empire, and had eventually vanquished it; but, while she succeeded in teaching it the new song of the Saints, she did not demand of it that flexibility of the organs of speech which only exists in the young. It was the case of an old man learning a foreign tongue; its figure, gait, attitudes, and gestures, and in like manner its accent, belonged to an earlier time. Up to the point at which a change was imperative, its institutions were suffered to remain just as they had been in paganism; christianized just so far as to enable them to work christian-wise, however cumbrously or circuitously. And as to the system of education in particular, I suppose the primary, or, as they may be better called, the grammar schools, as far as they were not private speculations, were from first to last in the hands of the State; state-institutions, first of pagan, then of mixed education. I do not mean to say that there are no traces in Christian antiquity of a higher pattern of education, in which religion and learning were brought together,—as in the method of teaching which St. Basil and St. Gregory brought into Asia Minor from Alexandria, and in the Benedictine Schools of Italy; but I am speaking of what the Christian Empire did, and again of what the Church exacted from it. She for the most part confined herself to the education of the clergy, and their ecclesiastical education; the laity and secular learning seem to have been still, more or less, in the charge of the State;—not, however, as if this were the best way of doing things, as the attempts I have spoken of bore testimony, but, because she found things in a certain state, and used them as best she could. Her aim was to make the Empire Christian, not to revolutionize it; and, without a revolution of society, the typical form of a Christian polity could not have been given to the institutions of Rome. But, when society was broken up, and had to be constructed over again, the case was different; it would have been as preposterous, under such circumstances, not to build it up upon Catholicity, as it would have been to attempt to do so before. Henceforth, as all government, so all education, was to be founded on Revealed Truth. Secular teaching was to be united to sacred; and the Church had the supervision both of lay students and of profane learning.
The new state of things began in the Frankish Empire; but it is observable how Rome after all strikes the key note of the movement. Charlemagne indeed betook himself to the two Islands of the North for a tradition; Alcuin, an Englishman, was at the head of his educational establishments; he came to France, not with sacred learning only, but with profane; he set up schools for laity as well as clergy; but whence was it that he in turn got the tradition which he brought? His history takes us back to that earlier age, when Theodore of Tarsus, Primate of England, brought with him thither from Rome the classics, and made Greek and Latin as familiar to the Anglo-Saxons as their native tongue. Alcuin was the scholar of Bede and Egbert; Egbert was educated in the York school of Theodore, and Bede in that of Benedict Biscop and of John precentor of the Vatican Basilica. Here was the germ of the new civilization of Europe, which was to join together what man had divided, to adjust the claims of Reason and of Revelation, and to fit men for this world while it trained them for another. Charlemagne has the glory of commencing this noble work; and, whether his school at Paris be called a University or not, he laid down principles of which a University is the result, in that he aimed at educating all classes, and undertook all subjects of teaching.