The rhetorical tradition, therefore, lived on; and it survived the more easily because of the controversial nature of Christianity at this time and the importance of preaching. The change from the rhetor’s ‘cathedra’ to the pulpit was often merely one of place and subject: the method was the same. And so the ideal of the orator persisted. In education it persisted for the further obvious reason that the monasteries had not yet organized themselves round the model of St. Benedict, and that very often Christian parents had to send their children to the pagan schools—in spite of Tertullian’s warnings.[959] The triumph of rhetoric among the Christians, however, was only partial. When the Christian Fathers observed their congregations of simple and unlettered folk, and remembered the injunction of Christ[960] and the teaching of St. Paul,[961] they began to feel the need of a more direct style of speech. Largely, too, it was a natural reaction, springing from the opposition between Christian and pagan, and the ascetism which the monasteries preached. This reaction is noticeable chiefly in the Church Fathers. In their prefaces it became the customary thing to proclaim their ‘rusticity’, and to hide (sometimes with false modesty) the traces of their rhetorical training.[962] So much was this the tendency, that Sidonius, with all his highly refined artificiality, must needs talk about his ‘countrified style’ (‘Si quid stilo rusticante peraravero’,[963] ‘in hoc stylo cui non urbanus lepos inest sed pagana rusticitas’[964]). Partly, of course, this was due to the over-courteous ways of high society at that time, as we may see from the correspondence of Symmachus or of Ausonius, and to an idea (never carried out by these gentlemen) that letter-writing ought to be careless and natural.[965] But the reaction against rhetoric was very strong. None of the Christian clergy dared to defend the rhetoricians openly. Lactantius, who did so,[966] was a layman. The inscriptions reflect this tendency, or at any rate one of its causes—the simplicity and ignorance of the people. The Christian epitaphs, though influenced now and then by rhetorical floridness, as in the case of those composed by Sidonius,[967] are much shorter and simpler than the pagan ones. Sometimes they consist merely of a cross with the name of the person.[968] Sometimes the words ‘pax tecum’ are added. The increase in Christian education is indicated by the fact that there are only four inscriptions dating from the fourth century and fifty-four from the fifth.