“Latin was begun very early (apparently immediately after the psaltery was known), with the _learning by heart_ of declensions and conjugations and lists of vocables. The rule was to use Latin in the school in conversing.... In the eleventh century, if not earlier, Latin conversation-books ... were not only read, but, like everything else, _learned by heart_.”[85] Their method of studying Latin emphasizes the thought of the formal abstract way of teaching, which tended to conservatism and mental subjection. “Memory is the faculty that subordinates the present under the past, and its extensive training develops a habit of mind that holds by what is prescribed, and recoils from the new and untried. In short, the educational curriculum that lays great stress on memorizing, produces a class of conservative people.”[86] The papal schools employed methods which, in themselves, in the course of a few generations would develop dependent rather than independent thinking; therefore methods are as important as the subject taught. [Sidenote: Result of universal language] Again it is well to remember that there was a deep design in making the Latin tongue universal. It was one of the ways by which the papacy kept its control of all nations and tongues. Draper explains it thus:— “The unity of the church, and, therefore, _its power_, required the use of Latin as a sacred language. Through this Rome had stood in an attitude strictly European, and was enabled to maintain a general international relation. It gave her far more power than her asserted celestial authority.... Their officials could pass without difficulty into every nation, and communicate without embarrassment with each other, from Ireland to Bohemia, from Italy to Scotland.”[87] [Sidenote: Fables and traditions of men] The character of the youth was formed, says Painter, from memorizing “the _fables of Æsop_ and collections of maxims and proverbs. After this, Virgil was usually the text-book, and was handled in the same style.” [Sidenote: Studies of Monastic schools] Of the monastic schools Mosheim says: “In most of the schools, the so-called seven liberal arts were taught. The pupil commenced with grammar, then proceeded to rhetoric, and afterward to logic or dialectics. Having thus mastered the Trivium, as it was called, those who aspired to greater attainments proceeded with slow steps through the _Quadrivium_ [a course including arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy] to the honor of perfectly learned men.”[88]