The religious revolution need not detain us.  It is sufficient to recall that in many parts of Europe the divergence of creed tended to become if not identical with, at least closely to follow the boundaries of states and nations.  In every land the school was still strictly under the control of the Church, acting now as the delegate of the temporal ruler, and in each country a whole body of teaching and discipline was evolved, the result of which was a fundamental difference in the attitude of mind.  The English bishops, the German consistories, the Scotch presbytery, set their seal on the schools, as much as did the Jesuits and Port Royal in France.  The Shorter Catechism, the English Prayer Book, the German hymns, each gave a distinct character to the religions of the country, and this character was the basis of the teaching in the schools.

Religion, which had been the great unifier, became the chief engine of separation.

Equally important was the growth of national literature.  This indeed goes back far beyond the sixteenth century, but none the less it is from this time that the writers not only of imagination, but also of learning, began to express themselves each in his own vernacular.  Sir Thomas More, it is true, wrote his Utopia in Latin, but it was in English that it had its great circulation.  Bacon used both languages, but it is on English editions of his works that his fame chiefly rests.  In particular we find that works on religion and theology are now produced not only in Latin, but one hundred years before Hooker would have discoursed on ‘ecclesiastical polity’ in the learned language, and Pascal would never have thought of using French for discussing the philosophy of the Jesuits.

The influence of these changes upon the school is remarkable.  Strictly speaking, for many generations they seemed to have little immediate effect upon it.  In every country in Europe Latin remained both the subject and the vehicle of higher education, but it is just for this reason that we find that, during the seventeenth century and the greater part of the eighteenth, the schools are more and more falling out of touch with the intellectual life of the times.  They continued in the old way; for them Shakespeare and Milton, Montaigne and Moliere, Cervantes and Tasso, seemed to have written in vain.  They maintained the form of an older period, but they had lost the spirit by which it had been inspired.  Their learning remained purely classical; but even though the new national literature was long in winning for itself a definite place in the recognized school system, the growth of this literature and the evolution of national consciousness of which it was a part could not in fact take place without altering the whole spirit of the teaching.  If we are to understand how this was we must keep in mind one of the chief characteristics of what is called a classical education.