Above all, a complete change in the basis of education influenced men deeply. For centuries education had occupied itself with science, and particularly the ethical sciences. Philosophy in its various aspects constituted the curriculum of the old universities. Metaphysics, logic, rhetoric, grammar, the ethical philosophies or, as we would say, sciences of the world, of thought, of speech, and of political and moral science, though of course also mathematics, music and astronomy, had been the subjects of special attention. Now men {244} were trained by means of the classics, the New Learning, as it was called. Quite naturally they came to know so much more about these than their fathers had ever had the opportunity to learn and, above all, they had come to think these so much more important than anything that had been taught their fathers, that the rising generation were quite sure that they knew ever so much more than preceding generations had known. A corresponding state of mind developed in our own time when, as a consequence of the gradual replacement of the classics in university curricula by science, another generation arose educated very differently from its forefathers. What has come to be called modernism, which may be best defined as the feeling that we in the modern time know so much more than our forefathers did that we can scarcely be expected to accept complacently the philosophy and religion that satisfied them, is really an intellectual movement very similar to that which can be noted nearly everywhere during Columbus' Century. The picture of it as drawn by Janssen, in his "History of the German People" (Vol. III, p. 17), can scarcely fail to attract attention, because of its anticipation of what are usually considered to be quite modern ideas. There was the same lack of respect for the older time, the same feeling that until their precious time men really did not know enough to be able to take any serious thought about the Church and Christianity, and the same tendency to make fun of practices of the older time simply because of failure to understand the spirit behind them. The passage is all the more interesting when it is recalled that nearly every one of the men who thus in his younger years was so sure of the failure of the Church in its mission came back in later life and recognized that without Christian unity, and even the dogmatism which earlier he had so contemned, there could be no real church. Janssen said: