THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS. Aside from the general instruction in the practices of the church and home instruction in the work of a woman, there was but little provision made for the education of girls not desiring to join a convent or nunnery. A few, however, obtained a limited amount of intellectual training. The letter of Saint Jerome to the Roman lady Paula (R. 45), regarding the education of her daughter, is a very important document in the history of early Christian education for girls. Dating from 403, it outlines the type of training a young girl should be given who was to be properly educated in Christian faith and properly consecrated to God. What he outlined was education for nunneries, a number of which had been founded in the East and a few in the West. In the West these institutions later experienced an extensive development, and offered the chief opportunity for any intellectual education for women during the whole of the Middle Ages. III. WHAT THE MIDDLE AGES STARTED WITH WHAT THE CHURCH BROUGHT TO THE MIDDLE AGES. From a small and purely spiritual organization, devoting its energies to exhortation and to the moral regeneration of mankind, and without creed or form of government, as the Christian Church was in the first two centuries of its development, we have traced the organization of a body of doctrine, the perfection of a strong system of church government, and the development of a very limited educational system designed merely to train leaders for its service. We have also shown how it added to its early ecclesiastical organization a strong governmental organization, became a State within a State, and gradually came to direct the State itself. It was thus ready, when the virtual separation of the Roman Empire into an eastern and western division took place, in 395, and when the western division finally fell before the barbarian onslaughts, to take up in a way the work of the State, force the barbarian hordes to acknowledge its power, and begin the process of civilizing these new tribes and building up once more a civilization in the western world. In addition to its spiritual and political power, the Church also had developed, in its catechumenal instruction and in the cathedral and monastic schools, a very meager form of an educational system for the training of its future leaders and servants. A great change had now taken place in the nature of education as a preparation for life, and intellectual education, in the sense that it was known and understood in Greece and Rome, was not to be known again in the western world for almost a thousand years. The distinguishing characteristic of the centuries which follow, up to the Revival of Learning, are, first, a struggle against very adverse odds to prevent civilization from disappearing entirely, and later a struggle to build up new foundations upon which world civilization might begin once more where it had left off in Greece and Rome.