Thus encouraged by the now influential advocates of the teaching of Buddha, themselves admirers of the Chinese learning, Confucianism began with renewed vigour to exercise a great influence on the future of the Japanese. This took place during the seventh century, when the reorganisation of the Japanese government after the model of that of the Celestial Empire made our educational system quite Chinese. In addition to a university, there were many provincial schools where candidates for the government service were instructed. Medicine, mathematics, including astronomy and law, taught through Chinese books, along with the all-important teaching in the Confucian ethics and in Chinese literature generally, were the branches of study cultivated under the guidance of professors whose calling had become hereditary among a certain number of learned families. In the course of the next two centuries we see several private institutions founded by great nobles of the court, with an endowment in land for their support. The native system of writing which had gradually emerged out of the phonetic use of Chinese ideographs made it possible for Japanese thought, hitherto expressed only in an uncongenial foreign garb, to appear in purely Japanese attire. Thus we find the dawn of Japanese civilisation appearing at the beginning of the tenth century after Christ. The air was replete with the Buddhist thought of after-life and the Confucian ideas of broad-day morality. The sonorous reading of the Book of Filial Piety was heard all over the country, echoing with the loud recital of the _Myôhô-renge-kyô_ (or _Saddharma Pundarika Sûtra_). During the dark and dreary Middle Ages which followed this golden period, and which were brought about by the degeneration of the ruling nobles and by the gradually rising power of the military class, Chinese learning fled to the protecting hands of Buddhist priests; and in its quiet refuge within the monastery walls it continued to breathe its humble existence, until it found at the beginning of the sixteenth century a powerful patron in the great founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate. The education of the common people, too, seems to have been kept up by the monks--a fact still preserved in the word _tera-koya_, 'church seminary,' a term used, until forty years ago, to express the tiny private schools for children. It must be remembered that the education thus given was always of an exclusively secular character, basing itself on the Confucian morals.