Thus the wiser among the Christians opposed the policy of exclusiveness. They foresaw that though bigoted zeal and a natural antipathy might keep out pagan letters for a time, in the end they could not do so; and they realized that it was one of the functions of the Church to hand down what was good in the old culture. So the two Apollinarii (fourth century), Christian teachers of Laodicea, turned the Old Testament into heroic verse and the New Testament into Platonic dialogues;[1002] Juvencus put the gospels into metre, and Nonnus wrote out St. John in hexameters. In order to appeal to the intellectual classes the Christian writers were bound to follow the pagan models, and so a virtue was made of necessity: for amid the distraction of the failing Empire it was the Church alone that could have saved the form and content of the ancient culture by providing scribes for the one and thinkers for the other. It would have been interesting to have Paulinus of Nola’s Panegyric on Theodosius. ‘Quid interfuerit tum inter Christianum oratorem, et oratorem, in scriptis saltem, paganum’ (says Monnard[1003]) ‘diiudicare liceret, nisi temporis invidia Panegyrico Theodosii, quem Paulinus scripserat, quemque cum Ausonii Panegyrico conferre potuissemus nos privavisset.’ We should also have been able to see how far he followed the pagan model, especially in view of his extreme statements to Ausonius[1004] on the subject of pagan literature. Probably he was just as rhetorical as Hilary in his Demosthenic denunciation of Constantine. This supposition is confirmed by the words of Jerome, who is enthusiastic in his praise of the speech. ‘If the author’, he says, ‘surpasses others in the beginning of his oration, towards the end he excels himself. His style is brilliant with Ciceronian purity, yet copious in thought.’[1005] There was a certain amount of hypocrisy in the railing of the Christian writers against the pagan authors. In spite of her criticism and antipathy, therefore, the Church listened to her leaders in their wiser moods and saved pagan culture. She set her monks to copy the ancient authors.[1006] Augustine ‘brought Plato into the (Christian) schools under his bishop’s robe’, and even Jerome expounded lyric and comic poets to the children at Bethlehem.[1007] Vergil, in particular, was admitted on account of the prophecy supposed to be contained in the fourth _Eclogue_. Roman law, of which Bossuet said that good sense, the master of human life, reigned throughout it, was regarded by the Church as a reflection of divine justice, and studied more particularly on account of its supposed similarity to the law of Moses.[1008] Through the Church it passed to the barbarians, and so became a heritage of the civilized world.