age, we shall thank God that he has not let your soul be
polluted." The ecclesiastical law was positive: it is to be
found concisely stated in the Statuta Ecclesiœ antiqua, ¹ which
regulated the conduct of the clergy: "The bishop ought not
to indulge in the reading of pagan books."

Thus profane authors were accursed, and attention
was limited to the professional duties of the priesthood
and of the monastic state. Fortunately the performance
of these duties required some rudiments of instruction. To be
a priest, or even to be in the lowest rank of the clergy, it was
necessary to be able to read the liturgical offices. To be a
monk it was necessary unceasingly to acquire a provision of
edifying thoughts, and to seek these thoughts where they
were to be found, that is to say, in the Bible, in the lives
of saints, in the instructions of spiritual masters: it was
necessary to read. A virtue was made of necessity. Cæsarius
ordered the monks and nuns to devote two hours each day
to reading. ² He saw the obstacle that women would en-
counter in observing this rule; be required the nuns to learn
to read. In his Statuta is the following order relating to the
clergy: ³ "All the clergy capable of work, shall practise a
trade, and shall learn to read." The rule of St. Benedict, like
that of Cæsarius, also required the monks to devote several
hours every day to reading. ⁴ The council of Orleans ( A.D. 533)
prescribed that the priest and the deacon should know how
to read, and should know the baptismal liturgy. ⁵ Four
years previously, the council of Vaison (529) advised every
priest in a monastery to do what, it said, was done in Italy;
that is, to take a child under his care, to teach him the Psalter,
liturgical functions, and Christian morals,--in short, to put
him in the way to succeed him. ⁶

It is often supposed that this council transformed the
clergy into a corps of public teachers charged with imparting

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