CATECHETICAL SCHOOLS. After Christianity had begun to make converts among the more serious-minded and better-educated citizens of the Roman Empire, the need for more than rudimentary instruction in the principles of the church life began to be felt. Especially was this the case in the places where Christian workers came in contact with the best scholars of the Hellenic learning, and particularly at Alexandria, Athens, and the cities of Asia Minor. The speculative Greek would not be satisfied with the simple, unorganized faith of the early Christians. He wanted to understand it as a system of thought, and asked many questions that were hard to answer. To meet the critical inquiry of learned Greeks, it became desirable that the clergy of the Church, in the East at least, should be equipped with a training similar to that of their critics. As a result there was finally evolved, first at Alexandria, and later at other places in the Empire, training schools for the leaders of the Church. These came to be known as _catechetical_ schools, from their oral questioning method of instruction, and this term was later applied to elementary religious instruction (whence _catechism_) throughout western Europe. Pantaenus, a converted Greek Stoic, who became head of the catechumenal instruction at Alexandria, in 179 A.D., brought to the training of future Christian leaders the strength of Greek learning and Greek philosophic thought. He and his successors, Clement and Origen, developed here an important school of Christian theology where Greek learning was used to interpret the Scriptures and train leaders for the service of the Church. Similar schools were opened at Antioch, Edessa, Nisibis, and Caesarea (See Map, p. 89), and these developed into a rudimentary form of theological schools for the education of the eastern Christian clergy. In these schools Christian faith and doctrine were formulated into a sort of system, the whole being tinctured through and through with Greek philosophic thought. Out of these schools came some of the great Fathers of the early Church; men who strove to uphold the pagan learning and reconcile Christianity and Greek philosophic thinking. [17]