Page images
PDF
EPUB

time to the scholastic treatise he had undertaken. Comenius, however, was a man of immense energy and of widely extended sympathies and connections. He was a bishop' of the religious body to which he belonged, and in this capacity he engaged in controversy, and attended some religious conferences. Then again, pupils were pressed upon him, and as money to pay five writers whom he kept at work was always running short, he did not decline them. De Geer complained of this, and supplies were not furnished with wonted regularity. In 1647 Comenius writes to Hartlib that he is almost overwhelmed with cares, and sick to death of writing beggingletters. Yet in this year he found means to publish a book On the Causes of this (i.e. the Thirty Years') War,' in which the Roman Catholics are attacked with great bitterness-a bitterness for which the position of the writer affords too good an excuse.

The year 1648 brought with it the downfall of all Comenius's hopes of returning to his native land. The Peace of Westphalia was concluded without any provision being made for the restoration of the exiles. But though thus doomed to pass the remaining years of his life in banishment, Comenius, in this year, seemed to have found an escape from all his pecuniary difficulties. The senior bishop, the head of the Moravian Brethren, died, and Comenius was chosen. to succeed him. In consequence of this, Comenius returned to Leszno, where due provision was made for him by the Brethren. Before he left Elbing, however, the fruit of his residence there, the 'Methodus Linguarum Novissima,' had been submitted to a com

WRITES THE ORBIS PICTUS.'

53

mission of learned Swedes, and approved of by them. The MS. went with him to Leszno, where it was published.

As head of the Moravian Church, there now devolved upon Comenius the care of all the exiles, and his widespread reputation enabled him to get situations for many of them in all Protestant countries. Indeed, he was now so much connected with the science of education, that even his post at Leszno did not prevent his receiving and accepting a call to reform the schools in Transylvania. A model school was formed at Saros-Patak, in which 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.'

Full of trouble as Comenius's life had hitherto been, its greatest calamity was still before him. After he was again settled at Leszno, 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 Leszno among them, were made over to Sweden, but when the King withdrew, the Poles took up arms again, and Leszno, 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.' After wandering for some time about Germany, 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 Bethren.

EDUCATION ACCORDING TO NATURE.

55

Before Comenius, no one had brought the mind of a philosopher to bear practically on the subject of education. Montaigne, Bacon, Milton, had advanced principles, leaving others to see to their application. A few able schoolmasters, as Ascham and Ratich, 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, we must allow to be on an immovable foundation, and, as Comenius himself says, 'not liable to any ruin'; but looking back on the fruit of Comenius's labours, we find that much which he thought thus based, was not so in reality that he often believed he was appealing to Nature, when in truth he was merely using fanciful illustrations from her. But whatever mistakes he and others may have made in consulting the oracle, it is no proof of wisdom to attempt, as practical men' often do, to use these mistakes in disparagement of the oracle itself; and because some have gone wrong when they thought they were following Nature, to treat every appeal to her with contempt. 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, but whoever in any way assists or even

6

tries to assist in the discovery, deserves our gratitude, and greatly are we indebted to him who first boldly set about the task, and devoted to it years of patient labour. Every one who has studied Comenius's voluminous writings is agreed that the 'Didactica Magna," though one of his earlier works, contains, in the best form, the principles he afterwards endeavoured to work out in the Janua,' Orbis Pictus,' and Novissima Methodus.' A short account of this book will give some notion of what Comenius did for education.

6

[ocr errors]

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 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.

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 taught, and so much time has been wasted over grammar rules and dictionaries, that from ten to twenty years are spent in acquiring

« PreviousContinue »