In order to appreciate the rapidity with which the relapse took place from the educational system introduced by Luther to the medieval principles and methods, our attention is directed to the school of John Sturm. This man, “regarded as the greatest educator that the Reformed Church produced during this period,” died in 1589, less than seventy years after the Diet of Worms; hence his work fell within the half century following those forty years of unusual prosperity for Protestantism which has already been noticed. His work is contemporary with the first Jesuit school of Germany. The decline is visible in every feature of his work. _John Sturm_ presided for forty years over the gymnasium of Strasburg, and his boast was that his institution “reproduced the best periods of Athens and Rome; and, in fact, he succeeded in giving to his adopted city the name of New Athens.” Sturm’s school stood as a halfway mark between the Christian schools and the purely papal schools of the Jesuits, but since compromise always places a person or institution on the side of wrong, in weighing the worth of his school the balances necessarily tip in favor of the papacy. [Sidenote: Course of study in Sturm’s school] That his was a mixture of the medieval classical literature with a thin slice of Scripture sandwiched in for effect, is seen in the course of study as outlined by Painter. The school was divided into ten classes covering ten years, but only so much is given as is necessary to show the character of the studies: “Tenth class—The alphabet, reading, writing, Latin declensions and conjugations, German or Latin catechism.” “Ninth class—Latin declensions and conjugations continued. Memorizing of Latin words.” The eighth and the seventh classes are about the same. In the sixth, Greek is begun. The fifth class is as follows: “Study of words, ... versification, mythology, Cicero, and Virgil’s eclogues, Greek vocabulary.... On Saturday and Sunday, one of Paul’s epistles.”[135] The remaining four classes have much “learning by heart,” rhetoric, Paul’s epistles, orations of Demosthenes, the Iliad of Odyssey; memorizing and recitation of the Epistle to the Romans, dialectics, and rhetoric continued; Virgil, Horace, Homer, Thucidides, Sallust, weekly dramatic entertainments, and again a reading of Paul’s epistles. Such a course of instruction was well fitted to bridge the gulf between the papacy and Protestantism. It was imbibing perhaps unconsciously the spirit of the new papal schools. “History, mathematics, natural science, and the mother tongue are ignored. A great gap is left between the gymnasium and life—a gap that could not be filled even by the university. In aiming to reproduce Greece and Rome in the midst of modern Christian civilization, Sturm’s scheme involves a _vast anachronism_.”[136] [Sidenote: Influence of Sturm’s school]