in which they must pass five years before being admitted to the priesthood.[11] A few years later we find St. Zozimus ordaining that the young clerics should remain in the rank of lectors till their twentieth year, and that they should not be raised to the priesthood until after many years of trial. St. Leo I. writes to the African bishops, about the middle of the fifth century, appealing to the venerable ordinances of the holy fathers on the ordination of those _who have lived from childhood subject to ecclesiastical discipline_, by which expression we must certainly understand the young lectors of the episcopal seminaries. And, glancing on to the eighth and ninth centuries, we find exactly the same discipline kept up in the school of the Patriarchium as had existed in the seventh. Pope Gregory II. is spoken of as brought up from childhood in the Lateran palace, “under the eye and discipline of the Blessed Pontiff Sergius,”[12] as being promoted by him to the subdiaconate, and after having for some years discharged the offices of treasurer and librarian, being advanced to the rank of deacon and, subsequently, of priest. So, too, Pope Leo III. is described as “educated from infancy in all ecclesiastical and divine discipline in the _vestiarium_ of the Lateran Palace.” In most cases the Lateran seminary was presided over by the Roman archdeacon, and, as we shall see, the superintendence of the cathedral schools continued, in after ages, to form one of the duties commonly attached to the archdiaconate.