The attitude of the ‘extreme’ Christians towards pagan literature is not, therefore, entirely inexplicable. But all were not extreme. The better spirits like Augustine, realizing that Christian education inevitably depended largely on the nobles who had come to the Church from the rhetorical schools, went on the principle of ‘spoiling the Egyptians’, of taking from pagan education and literature whatever was good and useful. Jerome protests against the narrow standpoint with considerable emphasis. He criticizes those who neglect style, and flares up at the suggestion that he is afraid of the pagan training of his opponents in controversy.[997] Ignorance, he says, is not holiness, and lack of culture is unfitting in a student of the Apostles. ‘Nec rusticus et tantum simplex frater ideo se sanctum putet si nil noverit, nec peritus et eloquens in lingua aestimet sanctitatem.’[998] He felt the need of rhetoric as a weapon against opponents. A holy ignorance, he argued, is a gain only to itself (he is curiously reluctant either to accept pagan learning entirely or to condemn it utterly), but all it builds up of the Church of Christ is lost if it does not meet its opponents.[999] So, too, Paulinus of Nola and Prudentius ‘quidquid e paganis operibus novae fidei non adversabatur laudabant et servabant’.[1000] Sedulius, again, refused to draw the rigid line which the extremists drew: he wants to retain the culture of his time, but in a Christianized form. In the dedication of his _Carmen Paschale_ to Macedonius he argues that he writes in verse because ‘there are many who, owing to their training in secular studies, are attracted rather by the delights of verse and the pleasures of poetry’; and that the Church must make use of this artistic tendency in people (_horum mores non repudiandos aestimo_). They will remember divine truths better if they are pleased with the form in which they are presented, and everybody must be freely won for God along the line of his particular bent (_ut quisque suo magis ingenio voluntarius acquiratur Deo_). The way in which you approach the faith does not matter so long as you get there and remain there.[1001] It is clear that he stands for liberalism in this matter and does not object to pagan literature if only the object in view is the right one.