The last stages of the transition from the pagan to the Middle Ages can best be traced in the history of the northern province of Gaul. Subjected to regular imperial administration within a generation of its conquest by Cæsar, Gaul for some centuries actually gained in civilisation, the imperial regimen being relatively more favourable to nearly every species of material progress than that of the old chiefs.[424] The emperors even in the fourth century are found maintaining there the professorships of rhetoric, language, law, philosophy and medicine first founded by Marcus Antoninus;[425] and until finance began to fail and the barbarians to invade, the material conditions were not retrograde. But the general intellectual life was merely imitative and retrospective; and the middle and upper classes, for which the higher schools existed, were already decaying in Gaul as elsewhere. The old trouble, besides, the official veto on all vital political discussion--if indeed any appetite for such discussion survived--drove literature either into mere erudition or into triviality. On the other hand, the growing Church offered a field of ostensibly free intellectual activity, and so was for a time highly productive, in point of sheer quantity of writing; a circumstance naturally placed by later inquirers to the credit of its creed. The phenomenon was of course simply one of the passage of energy by the line of least resistance. Within the Church, to which they turned as did thoughtful Greeks to philosophy after the rise of Alexander's Empire, men of mental tastes and moderate culture found both shelter and support; and the first Gaulish monasteries, unlike those of Egypt and the East, were, as M. Guizot has noted, places for conference rather than for solitary life.[426] There, for men who believed the creed, which was as credible as the older doctrines, there was a constant exercise for the mind on interests that were relatively real, albeit profoundly divided from the interests of the community. Thus, at a time when the community needed all its mental energy to meet its political need, that mental energy was spent in the discussion of insoluble and insane problems, of predestination and freewill, of faith and works, of fasts, celibacy, the Trinity, immortality, and the worship of saints. Men such as Ambrose and Jerome in Italy, Paulinus, Cassian, Hilary, and Salvian in Gaul, Chrysostom in the East, and Augustine in the South, represent as it were the last vibrations of the civilised intelligence; their energy, vainly spent on what they felt to be great issues, hints of the amount of force that was still running to waste throughout the Empire.