This personal instruction became common everywhere in the early Church, and the training was known as _catechumenal_, that is, rudimentary, instruction. Two sets of catechumenal lectures have survived, which give an idea as to the nature of the instruction. They cover the essentials of church practice and the religious life (RS. 39, 40). It was dropped entirely in the conversion of the barbarian tribes. This instruction, and the preaching of the elders (presbyters, who later evolved into priests), constituted the formal schooling of the early converts to Christianity in Italy and the East. Such instruction was never known in England, and but little in Gaul. The life in the Church made a moral and emotional, rather than an intellectual appeal. In fact the early Christians felt but little need for the type of intellectual education provided by the Roman schools, and the character of the educated society about them, as they saw it, did not make them wish for the so-called pagan learning. Even if the parents of converts wished to provide additional educational advantages for their children, what could they do? A modern author states well the predicament of such Christian parents, when he says: All the schools were pagan. Not only were all the ceremonies of the official faith--and more especially the festivals of Minerva, who was the patroness of masters and pupils--celebrated at regular intervals in the schools, but the children were taught reading out of books saturated with the old mythology. There the Christian child made his first acquaintance with the deities of Olympus. He ran the danger of imbibing ideas entirely contrary to those which he had received at home. The fables he had learned to detest in his own home were explained, elucidated, and held up to his admiration every day by his masters. Was it right to put him thus into two schools of thought? What could be done that he might be educated, like every one else, and yet not run the risk of losing his faith? [16]