The public schools of the Empire were not generally resorted to by the faithful until after the conversion of Constantine, when Christians were permitted to aspire to the professor’s chair. But this privilege, great as it was, did not produce any material change in the character of the State academies; they continued to flourish under the Christian Cæsars as they had done under their pagan predecessors, but they never merited to be regarded as Christian institutions. Though both Constantine and Gratian did much to provide excellent rhetoricians and grammarians to instruct their subjects, and though Valentinian I. made some laudable efforts, to correct the worst abuses of the schools, they continued to bear the stamp of their origin; and it is a significant fact that, long after the establishment of a nominal Christianity in the institutions of the Empire, the saint whose children were destined to hold in their hands the future education of Europe is introduced to us in the first incident of his life, flying into the wilderness to escape the corruption of the semi-pagan schools of Rome.[17] St. Augustine has told us something of the condition of the schools of Carthage in his time, which may probably be taken as a fair specimen of the State gymnasia in other parts of the Empire. The masters exercised an excessive severity with their pupils, so that, as the saint confesses, he first began the use of prayer when yet a child, to beg of God that He would save him from a school flogging. His elders, and even his parents, were so used to the idea of these punishments, “whereby labour and sorrow are multiplied to the sons of Adam,” that they only made a jest of his sufferings. All the sweets of Greek poetry were, he says, sprinkled with gall to him, he being forced to learn them by “cruel terrors and stripes.” He lets us know moreover that the wholesome admonitions of Quinctilian were altogether neglected, and that the worst writings of the pagan authors were placed in the hands of the scholars. In academies where the professorial system reigned supreme, moral training was neither given nor expected; the professors were paid for teaching their pupils grammar and rhetoric, and, as St. Augustine remarks, would have treated it as a greater fault to pronounce _homo_ without the aspirate than to hate a man. Many were pagans, like Libanius, the master of St. Chrysostom; others were content with the smallest possible seasoning of Christianity. They were, in short, the _sophists_ by profession--a pragmatical race of beings whose mental horizon hardly extended beyond the logic of Aristotle and the rules of rhetoric. Honourable exceptions of course were to be found, such as Marius Victorinus, who in the Julian persecution resigned his school rather than renounce the Divine Word who maketh eloquent the tongues of children.[18] But as a general rule the professors troubled themselves very little about questions of Christian faith or ethics.