In all this there is no distinct reference to the education of the younger clerics as forming one of the duties of the cathedral clergy. The Council of Vaison, held in 528, speaks, indeed, of the parish priests, who are required, according to the practice of the priests of Italy, to bring up young lectors in their houses, who may succeed them in their cure; and the establishment of similar schools was solemnly ordered, in 680, by the General Council of Constantinople; but the institution, of which we here see the germ, was not the episcopal, but the priest’s or parochial school. However, in 531, the second Council of Toledo passed several canons, which bear distinct reference to the bishop’s seminary, which by this time is evidently supposed to be attached to the cathedral church. Those children who are destined by their parents for the ecclesiastical state are to receive the tonsure, and to be placed in the rank of lectors in order to be instructed _in the house of the church under the eyes of the bishop, by him who shall be appointed over them_. At the age of eighteen their vocation is to be publicly examined, that no one may embrace the ecclesiastical state save with his own free consent. If this be given, they may be ordained sub-deacons at twenty and deacons at twenty-five. And clerics so educated cannot pass to any other diocese, but owe canonical obedience to the bishop at whose charge they have been brought up.[15] Here, then, is the cathedral seminary fairly established, and a few years later we find it expanding into a noble public school. It was St. Leander, of Seville, who first conceived the idea of establishing a staff of professors for teaching the liberal arts in connection with his cathedral. He directed their labours in person, and received among his first scholars his own brother Isidore, who afterwards succeeded him in his see. Isidore greatly extended the range of studies, which included the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew tongues, and all the liberal arts, besides law and medicine. His famous _Origines_ drawn up for the use of this school present an encyclopedia of every known subject, and embody several fragments of ancient authors which would otherwise have been lost to us. The first five books treat of Grammar, Rhetoric, Philosophy, Dialectics, Music, Geometry, Mechanics, Astronomy, Jurisprudence, Chronology, and History. The sixth is on the Holy Scriptures, the seventh and eighth are on God and the Angels, the ninth on the various nations and languages of the earth, and the remaining books treat of Etymology. But his efforts for the promotion of Christian education did not stop here. In 633 he presided over the fourth Council of Toledo, at which all the bishops of Spain were required to establish seminaries in their cathedral cities on the model of that of Seville, the study of the three learned languages being specially enjoined. This decree was carried into effect, and hence it is commonly said that the system of