was making progress in many directions. Most of the old learning had been
recovered; the printing-press had been invented, and was at work
multiplying books; the study of Greek and Hebrew had been revived in the
western world; trade and commerce had begun; the cities and the
universities which had arisen had become centers of a new life; a new sea
route to India had been found and was in use; Columbus had discovered a
new world; the Church was more tolerant of new ideas than it had been for
centuries; and thought was being awakened in the western world to a degree
that had not taken place since the days of ancient Rome. The world seemed
about ready for rapid advances in many directions, and great progress in
learning, education, government, art, commerce, and invention seemed
almost within its grasp. Instead, there soon opened the most bitter and
vindictive religious conflict the world has ever known; western Christian
civilization was torn asunder; a century of religious warfare ensued; and
this was followed by other centuries of hatred and intolerance and
suspicion awakened by the great conflict.

Still, out of this conflict, though it for a time checked the orderly
development of civilization, much important educational progress was
ultimately to come. In promulgating the doctrine that the authority of the
Bible in religious matters is superior to the authority of the Church, the
basis for the elementary school for the masses of the people, and in
consequence the education of all, was laid. This meant the creation of an
entirely new type of school--the elementary, for the masses, and taught in
the native tongue--to supplement the Latin secondary schools which had
been an outgrowth of the revival of ancient learning, and the still
earlier cathedral and monastery schools of the Church.

The modern elementary vernacular school may then be said to be essentially
a product of the Protestant Reformation. This is true in a special sense