estant position has undergone during the course of the development of scientific historical criticism. Every step toward the newer, truer history has added striking details to the picture of the beneficent influences of the Church upon her people in every way. It has shown up pitilessly the subterfuges, the misstatements and the positive ignorance which have enabled Protestantism to maintain the opposite impression in people's minds in order to show how impossible was agreement with the Catholic Church, since it stood for backwardness and ignorance and utter lack of sympathy with intellectual development. 66 Now we find everywhere that just the opposite was true. Whenever the Reformation had the opportunity to exert itself to the full, education and culture suffered. Erasmus said in his time, Wherever Lutheranism reigns there is an end of literature." Churches and cathedrals that used to be marvellous expressions of the artistic and poetic feeling of the people became the ugliest kind of mere meeting houses. Rev. Augustus Jessop, himself an Anglican clergyman, tells how art died out in rural England" after the Reformation, which he calls The Great Pillage, and King Whitewash and Queen Ugliness ruled supreme for centuries." The same thing happened in Germany, and education was affected quite as much as art. German national development was delayed, and she has come to take her place in world influence only in the nineteenth century, after most of the influence of the religious revolt led by Luther in the sixteenth century has passed away. These are but a few of the striking differences in recent history that are so well typified by the contrast between what was accomplished for art and culture and architecture and education by the Catholic Spaniard and the English Protestant here in America during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Truth is coming to her own at last, and it is in the history of education particularly that advances are being made which change the whole aspect of the significance of history during the past 350 years. "Tu recte vivis si curas esse quod audis; Neve putes alium sapiente bonoque beatum." HORACE, Ep., 1, 16. [You are living right if you take care to be what people say you are. Do not imagine that any one who is really happy is other than wise and good.] 66 Quod ipse sis, non quod habearis, interest."-PUBLIUS SYRUS. [The question is what you are, not what you are thought to be.] 66 May you so raise your character, that you may help to make the next age a better thing, and leave posterity in your debt for the advantage it shall receive by your example."-LORD HALIFAX. |