Saint Jerome, who was a great admirer of classical eloquence but a stern defender of pure Christianity, tells in a friendly letter to a certain lady a sad experience of his own. He had read much of Vergil and Cicero and other pagan books, when one night he found himself suddenly summoned before the heavenly judge. "Who are you?" he was questioned. "I am a Christian," he replied. "Thou liest, thou art a Ciceronian," was the judge's answer. And forthwith he was given over to cruel constables, who beat him frightfully until he promised never to touch a pagan book again. When he awoke in the morning he still felt the blows. The story is mere fancy, and Saint Jerome never proves so guilty of imitating his adored classical models as in this very letter. He was an actor who knew how to pose. But by this letter he has caused plenty of people in later time to dream over again the frightful experience he describes so suggestively. Dozens of monks and nuns have felt blows struck upon them by invisible hands for having given themselves too much to the seduction of reading classical books instead of the Bible. Again and again the leaders of monastic institutions had to insist upon the rule that the Bible must be read and no pagan books. Hrotswitha of Gandersheim, the nun who celebrated the great acts of the emperor Otto I, wrote some Biblical comedies, in order to prevent the nuns from enjoying the comedies of Plautus and Terence. On the other hand, all the great fathers of the church insisted upon classical training; so did Saint Jerome himself and Saint Augustine, not to speak of the great classical scholars in Christian bishoprics in the East (Plate XII). And even in the later centuries, when classical civilisation had gone and was only kept up artificially by assiduous reading, it was the church which maintained the right and the necessity of a classical training for its clergy. Alcuin was proud of the classical training he had had at home, at the famous monastic school of York under the direction of Abbot Ælbert. He enjoyed finding kernels of truth in the writings of the heathen, and he pointed out that Saint Paul had done the same. There was a time when there was no reading at all outside the clergy and the monasteries, but this reading was a combination of classical and Biblical. That is the great merit of the mediæval church. [Illustration: PLATE XII--BYZANTINE MINIATURE (Psalter, Paris B. N. gr. 139) David, playing harp while watching his sheep, looks like Orpheus in Greek art. The female figure at the left represents Melody, while at the right-hand corner Echo, also personified, is listening behind a pillar. The man in the cave to the right is Mount Bethlehem. From "Die Wiener Genesis." F. Tempsky, Vienna.] Mediæval civilisation had various foundations, but the Bible was one of them, and the most important one. That is what we find wherever we try to analyse mediæval culture.