The Port Royalists held that reason was more important than memory, but, while their ‘little schools’ stressed vernacular, logic, and geometry, they offered nothing beyond the best elements in the education of the past.
Elementary and industrial education was given an impulse for the Catholics by the schools of the Christian Brothers. They also opened training schools for teachers, and perfected the ‘simultaneous’ method.
Among the Protestants and some Catholics in Germany, Holland, Scotland, and certain of the American colonies, the Reformation inclined toward universal elementary education and control of the schools by the state. The secondary schools in Protestant countries also came largely under civic authorities, although the clergy still taught and inspected them; while Catholic secondary education was furnished mostly by the Jesuit colleges. In many instances the universities turned Protestant; and new universities, Protestant and Catholic, were founded.
[Sidenote: A series of revolts from the Church accompanied Northern humanism.]
=The Relation of the Reformation to the Renaissance.=--The series of revolts from the Catholic Church, generally known collectively as the ‘Reformation,’ may be regarded as closely connected with the Renaissance. As shown in the last chapter, humanism in the North led to a renewed study of the Scriptures and a reform of ecclesiastical doctrines and abuses, and took on a moral and religious color. Reformers arose, like Wimpfeling and Erasmus, who, while remaining within the Church, sought to purify it of corruption and obscurantism. But the Church at first stubbornly resisted all efforts at internal reform. Its immense wealth, large numbers, and training enabled it for a long time to thwart the spirit of the age, and a condition of ecclesiastical upheaval followed. Revolts against papal authority ensued in various parts of Europe north of Italy, and were furnished support by the awakened intellectual and social conditions of the sixteenth century. The result was the establishment of a church, or rather a set of churches, outside of Catholic Christianity. While each revolt had some peculiarities of its own, there were underlying them all certain general causes that indicated their relation to the Renaissance.