5 2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



decided that the New Testament was written in the purest Attic Greek, 

 and that any change was unnecessary. 



We meet now a most instructive manifestation in the history of 

 education. Formalism was blighting the Church, whether Catholic 

 or Protestant ; and blighting education, whether Jesuit or Lutheran. 

 This formalism encountered an entirely new opposition, and all educa- 

 tional movement received a most peculiar shaping. Spirituality is the 

 grace and life of some souls, as it is not the grace and life of some 

 other souls. Never a church or party so bad as to contain no spiritu- 

 ally-minded. These are they who now appear, materially affecting 

 the course and method of education. We should see clearly the po- 

 sition of affairs. Speaking historically, there are two oppositions to 

 scholastic orthodoxy in education : one, the realistic, basing itself 

 upon an experimental philosophy, and eventually working itself out 

 as a scientific method ; the other, spiritualistic, basing itself upon the 

 purely spiritual elements of our nature, and developing into mysticism, 

 pietism, and all vagary. There is a singularly interesting comparison 

 between these different attacks upon scholastic orthodoxy. We have 

 seen how the experimental philosophy received form and power from 

 Bacon ; we have seen how Comenius applied this philosophy to educa- 

 tion ; yet we know that education was not rescued from scholasticism. 

 The reason, as I believe, lies in this fact : A purely or even a largely 

 intellectual opposition was not able to reach the emotions and the con- 

 science, and, until these were profoundly stirred, there would be no 

 true, permanent deliverance from scholastic orthodoxy. A protest 

 must arise from the side of the feeling. Precisely this did arise, pre- 

 cisely such an opposition manifested itself within both churches, 

 appearing as Jansenism with the Catholics and pietism with the Prot- 

 estants. This emotional protest, this protest in the Church herself 

 against herself, brought clearly to view the radical antagonism be- 

 tween scholastic training and the newer methods everywhere appearing. 



Jansen, born 1585 in North Holland, found the fundamental evil of 

 his time to consist in the exclusive occupation of men with heathen phi- 

 losophy — i. e., with Aristotelian scholastic. He made a thorough sepa- 

 ration between philosophy and theology, believing them to rest upon 

 widely different bases. This Jansenist movement in the Catholic 

 Church was applied to education by the society at Port Royal. The 

 most celebrated representatives of the method are Rollin and Fenelon. 

 A sentence or two from Rollin will show his position : " I know that 

 the true purpose of the teacher is not merely to make the scholars 

 acquainted with Greek and Latin, or to teach them to write verses and 

 exercises, or to burden their memory with events and dates from 

 history, or to enable them to shape their conclusions in correct form, 

 or to draw lines and figures upon paper. I do not deny that these 

 studies are useful and worthy all praise, but only as means not as end, 

 only when they serve as preparations to better things." Rollin is 



