But this point must not be pursued too far. Education itself was based on the ancient literature of Greece and Rome—there was, indeed, nothing else on which to base it—and in the ablest and most cultured of the Christian writers the influence of the classical authors is evident on every page. Jerome dreamt that an angel came to rebuke him for his love of the rounded periods of Cicero—_Ciceronianus es, non Christianus_. Augustine bewails the tears he had wasted on the moving story of the Fall of Troy, while his heart was insensible to the sufferings of the Son of God. Lines and half lines from Virgil, or the choice of a Virgilian epithet, betray the ineradicable influence of the Mantuan over Ambrose. Even the author of the _De Mortibus Persecutorum_, despite his ferocious hatred of paganism, takes evident pleasure in the Ciceronian flavour of his maledictions. Do what he would, the cultured and educated Christian could not escape from the spell of the poets of antiquity. There were, of course, narrow-minded fanatics in plenty who would cheerfully have burned the contents of every pagan library and have imagined that they were offering an acceptable sacrifice, and there were doubtless many more who, without vindictiveness towards the classics, were quite content with want of culture, deeming that ignorance was more becoming to Christian simplicity (_Simplex sermo veritatis._) The tendencies of Christianity, as compared with paganism, were not towards what we call the humanities and a liberal education, for the dominant feeling was that there was only one book in the world which really mattered, and that was the Bible. There was, it is true, a slight literary renaissance starting at the close of the fourth century, with which we associate the names of Ausonius, Paulinus of Nola, Prudentius, and Claudian. This was mainly Christian. Ausonius strictly followed classical models; the graceful yet vigorous hymns of Prudentius were an original and valuable contribution to literature; Claudian stands neutral. “The last of the classics,” as Mr. Mackail has well said,[152] “he is, at the same time, the earliest and one of the most distinguished of the classicists. It might seem a mere chance whether his poetry belonged to the fourth or to the sixteenth century.” This literary renaissance, however, was a last flicker, and while we have to thank the Church for preserving the Latin tongue, we owe it little thanks—compared with the paganism it had overthrown—for its services to culture and the humanities. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the classics had to be rediscovered and relearnt: the dead spirit of humanism had to be quickened to a new birth. ----- Footnote 152: _History of Latin Literature_, Bk. III., c. 7. -----