REJECTION OF PAGAN LEARNING IN THE WEST. In the West, where the leaders of the Church came from the less philosophic and more practical Roman stock, and where the contact with a decadent society wakened a greater reaction, the tendency was to reject the Hellenic learning, and to depend more upon emotional faith and the enforcement of a moral life. By the close of the third century the hostility to the pagan schools and to the Hellenic learning had here become pronounced (R. 41). Even the Fathers of the Latin Church, the greatest of whom had been teachers of oratory or rhetoric in Roman schools before their conversion, [18] gradually came to reject the pagan learning as undesirable for Christians and in a large degree as a robbery from God. Saint Augustine, in his _Confessions_, hopes that God may forgive him for having enjoyed Vergil. Jerome's dream [19] was known and quoted throughout the Middle Ages. Tertullian, in his _Prescription against Heresies_, exclaims: What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church? What between heretics and Christians?... Away with all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic composition. Gregory the Great, Pope of the Church from 590 to 604, and who had been well educated as a youth in the surviving Roman-type schools, turned bitterly against the whole of pagan learning. "I am strongly of the opinion," he says, "that it is an indignity that the words of the oracle of Heaven should be restrained by the rules of Donatus" (grammar). In a letter to the Bishop of Vienne he berates him for giving instruction in grammar, concluding with--"the praise of Christ cannot lie in one mouth with the praise of Jupiter. Consider yourself what a crime it is for bishops to recite what would be improper for religiously-minded laymen." As a result Hellenic learning declined rapidly in importance in the West as the Church attained supremacy, and finally, in 401, the Council of Carthage, largely at the instigation of Saint Augustine, forbade the clergy to read any pagan author. In time Greek learning largely died out in the West, and was for a time almost entirely lost. Even the Greek language was forgotten, and was not known again in the West for nearly a thousand years. [20]