and too little of an evangelical spirit prevailed, education among them was more desirable than in corrupted families, or the schools of the sophists, in which vanity and ostentation were in every way encouraged."[1]
It is scarcely necessary to state that other religious orders before the foundation of the Society of Jesus, especially the Benedictines and the Dominicans, had rendered inestimable service to the cause of Christian education. Cardinal Newman compares the educational work of these three orders in the following terms: "As the physical universe is sustained and carried on in dependence on certain centres of power and laws of operation, so the course of the social and political world, and of that great religious organization called the Catholic Church, is found to proceed for the most part from the presence or action of definite persons, places, events, and institutions, as the visible cause of the whole. ... Education follows the same law: it has its history in Christianity, and its doctors or masters in that history. It has had three periods: the ancient, the medieval, and the modern; and there are three religious orders in those periods respectively which succeed, one the other, on its public stage, and represent the teaching given by the Catholic Church during the time of their ascendancy. The first period is that long series of centuries, during which society was breaking, or had broken up, and then slowly attempted its own reconstruction; the second may be called the period of reconstruction; and the third dates from the Reformation, when that peculiar movement of mind commenced, the issue of which is still to come. Now, St. Benedict has had the training of
- ↑ Ibid., p. 37.
