That there were different grades of advancement in the Christian schools is implied in the words of Eucherius when he reminds his son that his education was begun by Hilary but finished off (_consummatum_) by Vincentius and Salvian.[1099] But the general standard was undoubtedly low. To the remark of Caesarius that many business-men in his time could not write, we may add the testimony of the inscriptions. On four monuments of Briord we read: ‘Abstuta passiens dulcissema apta’, ‘Abstutus argus dulcissimus artus’, ‘Abstuti passiens dulcissimi aptu’, ‘Abstutus passiius dulcissernus aptus’, all for ‘Astutus largus patiens dulcissimus aptus’. And there are many variations of the lines inscribed by Jerome on Paula’s tomb: Aspicis augustum praecisa in rupe sepulcrum, hospitium Paulae est caelestia regna tenentis, which proclaim the ignorance of the inscribers.[1100] This does not mean that these people would have been better educated under the pagan system: there are many instances of mistakes in pagan inscriptions too. It merely means that Christianity was beginning to reach the simple folk, who otherwise would probably not have had the ability or the ambition even to make a wrong copy of a line of verse. In the pagan schools it is the upper classes that are prominent: in the Christian schools it is the lower. Higher education, therefore, hardly appears at all in the Christian writers. The former rhetorical school, with its declamations and its applause, fell away, though its influence survived. The rules of rhetoric may have been illustrated by examples which were applied in the pulpit, but there was no separate school for the art of speaking. Yet the germ of the modern university—as far as intellectual search for truth is concerned—was found in some of the monasteries, and there is at least one subject in which they had a contribution to make to higher education, philosophy. The curious way in which the Christian and pagan schools supplement and oppose one another is evident throughout. The Christian elementary school developed further the pagan system for lower education: the monastic studies formed an antithesis to the social atmosphere of the Bordeaux University; and, in particular, the study of philosophy and theology supplemented that lack of thought which we have seen in Ausonius and the fourth century in general. For it is in the fifth century that the most flourishing period of Gallic theology begins. All the greatest minds of the day busied themselves with the philosophy of religion.