Saros-Patak. Flight from Leszna.

accepting a call to reform the schools in Transylvania. A model school was formed at Saros-Patak, where there was a settlement of the banished Brethren, and in this school Comenius laboured from 1650 till 1654. At this time he wrote his most celebrated book, which is indeed only an abridgment of his Janua with the important addition of pictures, and sent it to Nürnberg, where it appeared three years later (1657). This was the famous Orbis Pictus.

§ 16. Full of trouble as Comenius' life had hitherto been, its greatest calamity was still before him. After he was again settled at Leszna, Poland was invaded by the Swedes, on which occasion the sympathies of the Brethren were with their fellow-Protestants, and Comenius was imprudent enough to write a congratulatory address to the Swedish King. A peace followed, by the terms of which, several towns, and Leszna among them, were made over to Sweden; but when the King withdrew, the Poles took up arms again, and Leszna, the headquarters of the Protestants, the town in which the chief of the Moravian Brethren had written his address welcoming the enemy, was taken and plundered.

Comenius and his family escaped, but his house was marked for special violence, and nothing was preserved. His sole remaining possessions were the clothes in which he and his family travelled. All his books and manuscripts were burnt, among them his valued work on Pansophia, and a Latin-Bohemian and Bohemian-Latin Dictionary, giving words, phrases, idioms, adages, and aphorisms-a book on which he had been labouring for forty years. "This loss," he writes, "I shall cease to lament only when I cease to breathe."

§ 17. After wandering for some time about Germany,

Last years at Amsterdam.

and being prostrated by fever at Hamburg, he at length came to Amsterdam, where Lawrence De Geer, the son of his deceased patron, gave him an asylum. Here were spent the remaining years of his life in ease and dignity. Compassion for his misfortunes was united with veneration for his learning and piety. He earned a sufficient income by giving instruction in the families of the wealthy; and by the liberality of De Geer he was enabled to publish a fine folio edition of all his writings on Education (1657). His political works, however, were to the last a source of trouble to him. His hostility to the Pope and the House of Hapsburg made him the dupe of certain "prophets" whose soothsayings he published as Lux in Tenebris. One of these prophets, who had announced that the Turk was to take Vienna, was executed at Pressburg, and the Lux in Tenebris at the same time burnt by the hangman. Before the news of this disgrace reached Amsterdam, Comenius was no more. He died in the year 1671, at the advanced age of eighty, and with him terminated the office of Chief Bishop among the Moravian Brethren.

§ 18. His long life had been full of trouble, and he saw little of the improvements he so earnestly desired and laboured after, but he continued the struggle hopefully to the end. In his seventy-seventh year he wrote these memorable words: "I thank God that I have all my life heen a man of aspirations. . . . For the longing after good, however it spring up in the heart, is always a rill flowing from the Fountain of all good-from God."* Labouring in

← Unum Necessarium, quoted by Raumer.

Compare George Eliot: "By desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is, and cannot do what we would, we

Comenius sought true foundation.

this spirit he did not toil in vain, and the historians of education have agreed in ranking him among the most influential as well as the most noble-minded of the Re formers.

$ 19. Before Comenius, no one had brought the mind of a philosopher to bear practically on the subject of education. Montaigne and Bacon had advanced principles, leaving others to see to their application. A few able schoolmasters, Ascham, e.g., had investigated new methods, but had made success in teaching the test to which they appealed, rather than any abstract principle. Comenius was at once a philosopher who had learnt of Bacon, and a schoolmaster who had earned his livelihood by teaching the rudiments. Dissatisfied with the state of education as he found it, he sought for a better system by an examination of the laws of Nature. Whatever is thus established is indeed on an immovable foundation, and, as Comenius himself says, not liable to any ruin." It will hardly be disputed, when broadly stated, that there are laws of Nature which must be obeyed in dealing with the mind, as with the body. No doubt these laws are not so easily established in the first case as in the second, nor can we find them without much "groping" and some mistakes; but whoever in any way assists or even tries to assist in the discovery, deserves our gratitude; and greatly are

are part of the Divine power against evil-widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower."—Middlemarch, bk. iv, p. 308 of first edition.

Threefold life. Seeds of learning, virtue, piety.

we indebted to him who first boldly set about the task, and devoted to it years of patient labour.

§ 20. Comenius has left voluminous Latin writings. Professor Laurie gives us the titles of the books connected with education, and they are in number forty-two: so there must be much repetition and indeed retractation; for Comenius was always learning, and one of his last books was Ventilabrum Sapientiæ, sive sapienter sua retractandi Ars—i.e., “Wisdom's Winnowing-machine, or the Art of wisely withdrawing one's own assertions." We owe much to Professor Laurie, who has served as a ventilabrum and left us a succinct and clear account of the Reformer's teaching. I have read little of the writings of Comenius except the German translation of the "Great Didactic," from which the following is taken.

21. We live, says Comenius, a threefold life-a vegetative, an animal, and an intellectual or spiritual. Of these, the first is perfect in the womb, the last in heaven. He is happy who comes with healthy body into the world, much more he who goes with healthy spirit out of it. According to the heavenly idea, man should (1) know all things; (2) should be master of all things, and of himself; (3) should refer everything to God. So that within us Nature has implanted the seeds of (1) learning, (2) virtue, and (3) piety. To bring these seeds to maturity is the object of education. All men require education, and God has made children unfit for other employments that they may have leisure to learn.

§ 22. But schools have failed, and instead of keeping to the true object of education, and teaching the foundations, relations, and intentions of all the most important things, they have neglected even the mother tongue, and confined the teaching to Latin; and yet that has been so badly

Omnia sponte fluant. Analogies.

taught, and so much time has been wasted over grammar rules and dictionaries, that from ten to twenty years are spent in acquiring as much knowledge of Latin as is speedily acquired of any modern tongue.

§ 23. The cause of this want of success is that the system does not follow Nature. Everything natural goes smoothly and easily. There must therefore be no pressure. Learning should come to children as swimming to fish, flying to birds, running to animals. As Aristotle says, the desire of knowledge is implanted in man: and the mind grows as the body does-by taking proper nourishment, not by being stretched on the rack.

§ 24. If we would ascertain how teaching and learning are to have good results, we must look to the known processes of Nature and Art. A man sows seed, and it comes up he knows not how, but in sowing it he must attend to the requirements of Nature. Let us then look to Nature to find out how knowledge takes root in young minds. We find that Nature waits for the fit time. Then, too, she has prepared the material before she gives it form. In our teaching we constantly run counter to these principles of hers. We give instruction before the young minds are ready to receive it. We give the form before the material. Words are taught before the things to which they refer. When a foreign tongue is to be taught, we commonly give the form, i.e., the grammatical rules, before we give the material, i.e., the language, to which the rules apply. We should begin with an author, or properly prepared translation-book, and abstract rules should never come before the examples.

§ 25. Again, Nature begins each of her works with its inmost part. Moreover, the crude form comes first, then