day is still longer. To become a teacher in the inferior classes required training until twenty-one at least, and for college (secondary) classes training until at least twenty-nine. The training was in scholarship, religion, theology, and an apprenticeship in teaching, and was superior to that required for a teaching license in any Protestant country of Europe, or in the Catholic Church itself outside of the Jesuit Order. With such carefully selected and well-educated teachers, themselves models of upright life in an age when priests and monks had been careless, it is not surprising that they wielded an influence wholly out of proportion to their numbers, and supplied Europe with its best secondary schools during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In the loyal Catholic countries they were virtually the first secondary schools outside of the monasteries and churches, and the real introduction of humanism into Spain, Portugal, and parts of France came with the establishment of the Jesuit humanistic colleges. For their schools they wrote new school books --the Protestant books, the most celebrated of which were those of Erasmus, Melanchthon, Sturm, and Lily, were not possible of use--and for a time they put new life into the humanistic type of education. Before the eighteenth century, however, their secondary schools had become as formal as had those in Protestant lands (R. 146), and their universities far more narrow and intolerant. The elements of strength and weakness in the Jesuit system of education has been well summarized by Dabney, [12] in the following words: The order of the Jesuits was anti-democratic, and was founded to uphold authority, and to antagonize the right of private judgment. With masterly skill they ruled the Catholic world for about two centuries; and, in the beginning of their activity, performed services of great value to mankind. For, although they aimed, in their system of education, to fit pupils merely for so-called practical avocations, and to avoid all subjects likely to stimulate them to independent thought, it was nevertheless the best system which had then appeared. In dropping the old scholastic methods, and teaching new and fresher subjects, although with the intention of perverting them to their own ends, they sowed, in fact, the germs of their own decay. In spite of their wonderful organization, and their indefatigable industry as courtiers in royal palaces, as professors in the universities, as teachers in the schools, as preachers, as confessors, and as missionaries, they were utterly unable to crush the spirit of doubt and inquiry. During the first half century of their existence they were intellectually in advance of their age; but after that they gradually dropped behind it, and, instead of diffusing knowledge, saw that the only hope of retaining their dominion was to oppose it with all their might.