pray the paternoster with the sons of the bourgeoisie. Far from it; the Jesuits spoke the jargon of the times; they had been infected with the new pagan Goddess of Reason, and their favorite citation from the unwieldy books of the church, in which everything may be found, was the words of St. Thomas: "There is an order based on reason for the general weal."[1]
The spirit of this school is that of classicism. The current of discontent, the opposition inherited by the sons of the bourgeoisie from their fathers, since the days of Philip of Valois, is handed down in the schools, and the opposition chooses the words and the spirit of classicism. While during the Renaissance the marble treasures of antiquity that had been buried by the Christian barbarians were again dug out and regarded as a revelation, one now sought in the texts of Tacitus, of Lucretius Carus and Cicero for points of contact to unite the ancient republican culture of the Romans with the new culture unfolding under the bourgeois republic. Again ancient Rome arises to give life to a new generation.[2]
The maxim uttered by Racine when a young man becomes the general maxim: "Under a king who is a burgher, all the burghers become kings."
These rich youths do not love Cæsar, "this sole
- ↑ Albert Sorel: L'Europe et la révolution française.
- ↑ Theodore Mommsen: History of Rome, New York, 1895.
