‘Liberales Artes’, Seneca had said, ‘non perducunt animum ad virtutem, sed expediunt.’[1159] We must be content if the school-training merely creates a disposition of mind favourable to virtue. The Christian schools went further. They insisted on correlating theory and practice, and prescribed definite lines of action. As against the hollowness of the pagan moral teaching (and here again we can detect a reaction), the Christian teachers on the whole not only tried to practise what they taught, but saw to it that their pupils carried out their commands. They were exhorted to do so in the Canons of the Church. They put before men a personal ideal, and, if their methods of striving after it were sometimes crude and exaggerated, their sincerity can hardly be doubted. So obsessed were they with the idea of working out their own salvation that their teaching tended to become oppressively moral. The long disquisitions of Jerome or Tertullian on the minute points of moral behaviour are sometimes positively unhealthy. But we must remember that they represented a reaction from an extreme. And in this reaction the seeds of a higher ethical standard were being sown. Not as the lightning lighteth the heavens, but as the growth of the mustard-tree, the stern teaching of the monks who saw a higher vision and fled the world for its sake penetrated and leavened the mass of society, whether that society called itself Christian or not. Already in the fifth century a better public opinion was being formed. We find Sidonius, half-pagan as he was, commending his villa at Avitacum because of the absence of immoral pictures and scenes—‘non hic per nudam pictorum corporum pulchritudinem turpis prostat historia, quae sicut ornat artem sic devenustat artificem.... Absunt lubrici tortuosique pugilatu et nexibus palaestritae (wrestlers) quoram etiam viventum luctus, si involvantur obscenius casta confestim gymnasiarchorum virga dissolvit.’[1160] So in his letter to his son,[1161] he praises him for loving purity and adopts the tone of the moral educator. It is not suggested that the pagan efforts to advocate morality were worth less than the Christian, or that there was a steady and abiding advance in morals from this time onwards. Only, there are two facts to bear in mind: the moral state of Gaul was bad, and paganism as a motive to morality had failed. Where then was the incentive to come from? Without claiming for the Church any special virtue, and realizing its many grievous errors, we must answer that the moral inspiration for the future came at this time through Christianity. And the Church and her schools were the channels by which this inspiration reached the people. Thus once more Christian education supplemented the work of the pagan schools. * * * * *