THE CHURCH AND ELEMENTARY EDUCATION. As was stated on a preceding page, the countries which remained loyal to the Church experienced none of the Protestant feeling as to the necessity for universal education for individual salvation. In such lands the church system of education which had grown up during the Middle Ages remained undisturbed, and was expanded but slowly with the passage of time. The Church, never having made general provision for education, was not prepared for such work. Teachers were scarce, there was no theory of education except the religious theory, and few knew what to do or how to do it. Many churchmen, too, did not see the need for doing anything. Nevertheless the Church, spurred on by the new demands of a world fast becoming modern, and by the exhortations of the official representatives of the people, [13] now began to make extra efforts, in the large cathedral cities, to remedy the deficiency of more than a thousand years. In Paris, for example, which was typical of other French cities, the Church organized a regular system of elementary schools, with teachers licensed by the Precentor of the cathedral of Notre Dame and nominally under his supervision, in which instruction was offered to children of the artisan and laboring classes, of both sexes, "in reading, writing, reckoning, the rudiments of Latin Grammar, Catechism, and singing." By 1675 these "Little Schools" in Paris came to contain "upwards of 5000 pupils, taught by some 330 masters and mistresses." All such schools, of course, remained under the immediate control of the Church, and modern state systems of education in the Catholic States are late nineteenth-century productions. In Spain, Portugal, Poland, and the Balkan States, general state systems of education have not even as yet been evolved. The general effect of the Reformation, though, was to stimulate the Church to greater activity in elementary, as well as in secondary and higher education. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we find a large number of decrees by church councils and exhortations by bishops urging the extension of the existing church system of education, so as to supply at least religious training to all the children of the faithful. As a result a number of teaching orders were organized, the aim of which was to assist the Church in providing elementary and religious education for the children of the laboring and artisan classes in the cities. TEACHING ORDERS ESTABLISHED. The teaching orders for elementary education, founded before the eighteenth century, with the dates of their foundation, were: