“The want of success in the excellent establishments of Charlemagne,” observes Mr. Berington, in his “Literary History of the Middle Ages,” “may be traced to various causes:--to the inaptitude of the teachers, who, though endowed with the natural powers of intellect, knew not how to excite attention or interest curiosity; to the subjects called sciences, or the seven liberal arts, which were so taught as to disgust by their barbarous elements, and of which the emaciated and haggard skeleton was alike unfit for ornament or use; to the absence of the first rudiments of education, as of reading and writing, in the higher orders of society, and their habitual devotion to martial exercises; to the oblivion in which the classical productions of former ages were held; to a want of capacity in the bishops and clergy and monks, upon whom the weighty charge of education had devolved; to a selfish reflection in the same order of men that, _in proportion to the decline of learning and the spread of ignorance, their churches and monasteries had prospered_, whilst the revival of letters was likely to direct the copious streams of benevolence into a channel less favourable to the interests of the clergy and monks; to a marked aversion in the Bishop of Rome to any scheme by which the minds of churchmen or others might be turned to the study of antiquity, and of those documents which would disclose on what futile reasons and sandy foundations the exclusive prerogatives of his see were established; and _to the genius of the Christian system_ itself, which, when it expelled the Pagan Deities from their seats, too successfully fixed a reproach on many things connected with them, and thus contributed to banish from the schools, and consign to oblivion those works on the study and prevalence of which will ever depend the progress of the arts, of the sciences, and of literary taste.”[121] The above passage has been somewhat of the longest, and I shall therefore do no more than allude to the terms in which another historian of the Middle Ages, of yet greater repute, speaks of “the inconceivable ignorance which overspread the face of the Church, broken only by a few glimmering lights which owe almost all their distinction to the surrounding darkness;” to his unqualified and unsupported declaration, that “the cathedral and monastic schools were exclusively designed for religious purposes, and afforded no opportunities to the laity;” that “for centuries it was rare for a layman, of whatever rank, to know how to sign his name;” that “with the monks a knowledge of church-music passed for literature;” and that as to the religion which prevailed during the same period, “it is _an extremely complex question whether it were not more injurious to public morals and the welfare of society than the entire absence of all religious notions_.”[122]