Meanwhile the Reformation had caused a revival of religious interest, and in Protestant countries like England, and later America, the influence of religion upon higher learning remained powerful. It permitted the classical tradition to survive in letter rather than in spirit. The naturalistic implications of the classics were ignored; commentators whenever possible read into the texts the conventional beliefs and sentiments of Protestantism. Humanism became “traditional education,” a new scholasticism, formal and innocuous, a mark of intellectual respectability, a “refining” influence, an embroidery of familiar quotation in the speech of parsons and country squires. Successive generations of grown-up schoolboys in Gothic halls, laboriously translated, over and over again, hackneyed passages from a literature that in the fifteenth century had been carried about like the fire of Prometheus, kindling defiance to Heaven all over Europe. Often men could think of no better reason for the study of the ancient classics than that in the tedium and monotony of language drill there was a “discipline” which was good for the soul. The student’s attention was centered upon the niceties of construction and upon the task of memorizing rules of grammar and a vocabulary, all stuffed into his head in the most artificial manner conceivable. He was not likely to be puzzled over the discovery that there might be something spiritually irreconcilable between Lucretius and the Thirty Nine Articles, or between the dialectic of Socrates and the Westminster confession of faith. There is a world of difference between this _denatured_ Humanism and that of Erasmus or Montaigne. That this traditional education made for polish and good breeding cannot be denied. Neither, I think, can it be denied that there was something sterile and illiberal in Protestant-classical education. It is significant that both the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and the progress of science in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries took place chiefly outside the established universities and sometimes in spite of their opposition.