Even among the stricter Christians there was generally an interest in learning outside theology. ‘In the East and in the West’, says Montalembert,[268] ‘literary culture, without being by right inseparably attached to the religious profession, became in fact a constant habit and a special distinction of the greater number of monasteries.’ In every monastery there was established, as time went on, a library, a studio for copying manuscripts and a school. The monasteries, in fact, became schools where science and profane learning were taught, as well as theology, and where Latin was studied at the same time with Hebrew and Greek.[269] This teaching was sometimes primitive and defective, and the picture is not so glowing as Montalembert suggests; but there were, at any rate, the beginnings of better things, the interest in education, and the means of protecting a valuable culture. The letters of Jerome to the Gallic women who ask him questions about the scriptures,[270] and his letters to Laeta on the education of her daughter Paula,[271] are indications of a similar activity, no less than Caesarius’s exhortations to reading and study,[272] the Christian pamphlets on difficult points which passed from hand to hand,[273] and Eucherius’s list of answers to the questions of his son Salonius.[274] The pedagogic significance of such works of exposition is apparent.[275] The tendencies to exclude and to imitate pagan literature sometimes merge into each other in the same writer. It was difficult for the Christian teachers to make up their minds definitely about pagan literature, placed as they were, in a time of extreme partisanship, between the attractiveness of pagan letters and the repulsiveness of pagan faith and practice. But if we are to distinguish a class of moderate men and take Sulpicius Severus as a type (though outside the _Chronicon_ his opposition to pagan literature is aggressively stated[276]) we may maintain that the middle party, too, was interested in culture and not cooled in its ardour by the moderation it displayed. Sulpicius makes Postumianus describe how widely the _Life of Martin_ was read. Taken from Gaul to Rome, it travelled thence to Carthage, Alexandria, Nitria, the Thebaid, Memphis. Even in the middle of the African desert an old man was found reading it.[277] The Church, therefore, had its share in Gaul’s widespread interest in education during this time.[278] The evidence of the inscriptions is disappointing. With such a general interest in culture we should have expected more frequent references to teachers and their activities. As it is, we find only a few inscriptions, and those in Southern Gaul, that bear on the subject. There is the epitaph of a grammarian at Vienne,[279] and the lament of a woman for her foster-son, whom she had educated, in the same town.[280]