So whenever educated mediaeval men were drawn by the ambitions or moved by the finer joys of human life, it lay in their path to seek instruction or satisfaction from some antique source. If a man wished the common education of a clerk, he drew it from antique text-books and their commentaries. Grammar and rhetoric meant Latin grammar and Latin rhetoric; dialectic also was Latin and antique. Likewise the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, could be studied only in Latin. These ordinary branches of education having been mastered, if then the man’s tastes or ambitions turned to the interests of earth (and who except the saintly recluse was not so drawn?) he would still look to the antique. A civilian or an ecclesiastic would need some knowledge of law, which for the most part was Roman, even when disguised as Canon law.[152] Did a man incline toward philosophy, and the scrutiny of life’s deeper problems, again the source was the antique; and when he lifted his mind to theology, he would still find himself reasoning in categories of antique dialectic. Finally, and this was a broad field of humane inclination, if a clerkly educated man loved poetry, eloquence, and history, for their own sakes, he also would turn to the antique. There is scarcely need to revert again to the use of the Classics in the earlier Middle Ages. We have seen that in Italy they never ceased to form the conscious background to all intellectual life; and that in the north, letters came a handmaid in the train of Latin Christianity--a handmaid that was apt to assert her own value, and also charm the minds of men. From the first, it was the orthodox view that Latin letters should provide the education enabling men to understand the Christian religion adequately. This is the object set forth in Charlemagne’s Capitularies upon education.[153] Three hundred years later Honorius of Autun says in his sermonizing way: “Not only, beloved, do the sacred writings lead us to eternal life, but profane letters also teach us; for edifying matter may be drawn from them. In view of sacred examples no one should be scandalized at this. For the children of Israel spoiled the Egyptians; they took gold and silver, gems and precious vestments, which they afterwards turned into God’s treasury to build the tabernacle.”[154]