a teacher of teachers, if in anything it be permitted me to be so, and a disciple of disciples where progress may be possible."

As characteristic as his humility was that eminently practical turn of mind-sound common sense we now would call it-which distinguishes his educational writings, though not more than his religious works and his official and private course of action everywhere. It was this that made him the thorough realist he was in all pertaining to the practical life of men; and it is all the more marked because along with this trait there was also unmistakably present in his mind a decided vein of mysticism, which at one time led him temporarily astray in his theological views. Is this not often so, that mysticism and the most practical realism go together? Are they not perchance only two phases of one and the same fundamental character, and that, too, of the strongest, grandest, and best characters produced in our humanity? They are the poet's distinction, the true poet, who is not less a "maker" because also a dreamer; and the prophets as well, if indeed poet and prophet be not one and the same, whose

"Clearer eye should see, in all

Earth's seeming woe, the seed of Heaven's flowers."

And Comenius had a poet's spirit, as his exquisitely conceived and written "Labyrinth of the World and Palace of the Heart" would alone be sufficient to prove-a prose poem written in his retreat at Brandeis, and still popularly read and prized as one of the gems of Bohemian classic literature-every way worthy to be called the forerunner of Bunyan's somewhat similar allegory.

Certainly in Comenius the practical and the mystic were closely joined, the accompaniments, if not the result, of an unusually refined, gentle, sensitive nature. The latter's fate it always is to be most liable to be tossed between the extremes of hope and fear; even as Comenius not seldom suffered from gloom and despondency, and then again rose to almost ecstatic heights of sanguine hope and expectation. Yet seldom did this really unbalance him. It went no deeper than his feelings. The sound, practical element invariably asserted itself, having the deeper hold on his nature, controlling his judgment and reason. While deeper even than this, enduring, persistent, unshaken by storms of circumstance or ebb and flow of passion, the primum mobile of his being was his firm faith in God, and fixed confidence in the justice and truth of him who is the Eternal Love.

It was this, rooted in his strong Czech character, that was the basis of that pertinacity of purpose and persevering hopefulness in the midst of defeat, disaster, and every opposition and contradiction, that gave him the clear gaze of a seer into the future, the firm utterance of a prophet of the Unitas Fratrum. When in midwinter of 1628, at the head of a band of refugees, he crossed the frontier mountains between his home and the

land of exile, looking back for the last time through his tears to behold. his dear fatherland once more, he knelt down on the snow-covered mountain top and broke forth in this impassioned cry to his God: "Wherefore dost Thou forget us forever, and forsake us for so long a time? Lead us back to Thee again, so that we may again return home. Renew our days as of old!" And ever after he trusted in the fulfillment of that petition; he looked for it; he relied on it with absolute confidence and faith. All his activity thenceforth was carried on in view of the accomplishment of this prophetic hope. To this end his scholastic work was prosecuted; to this end his History was written; to this end his Church's "Confession of Faith" republished, and the "Biblical Manual," and the Bohemian and German "Hymnals," and the "Catechism for the Scattered Sheep of Christ;" and to this end, finally, and most important and significant of all, his second edition, in 1660, of the "Ratio Disciplinæ," with its strikingly prophetic dedication "To the Anglican Church, heretofore driven about by manifold stormwinds, but now seeing before her a haven of rest." By these publications he meant to keep firm the principles of the scattered brethren, the hidden seed of the future, to stir up their zeal, strengthen them in their patient waiting, and keep pure their original doctrine and discipline; and, on the other hand, he solemnly charged the Anglican Church tenderly to care for "our dear mother the Unitas Fratrum, in her seemingly dying condition, until her restoration either in the home of her fathers or in some other land. "Whether God will deem her worthy to be revived in her native land," he writes, or let her die there and resuscitate her elsewhere, in either case do you, in our stead, care for her. You ought to love her, because in her life she has gone on before you, for more than two centuries, with examples of faith and patience. We certainly ought to take care that such gifts may not perish with us, and that amidst disorder and confusion, as these now exist, the foundations of our Unity may not be so entirely ruined as to make it impossible for our posterity to find them." The whole work is aglow with a broad Christian charity and a catholicity far in advance of his times-scarce yet reached, alas ! in our own.

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He was indeed zealous for his Church, but not with the zeal of a bigot or sectary. In all his life and works he proved the sincerity of his noble. words: "Let separate churches pass away, and ours with them, only let nothing that is good be lost, but rather be gathered into the common treasury of the Church universal." By word and example he labored for true Christian union everywhere. "Let all sects," he exclaims, "with their sympathizers and supporters go to nought. I have dedicated myself to Christ alone. He knows no sects, but hates them, and hath given peace and mutual love to his own as their inheritance."

All this is in perfect keeping with those true and precious utterances wherewith he brought his literary labors to a close in his "Unum Neces

sarium," which, he says, "John Amos Comenius, a Sire, in his seventyseventh year, exhausted by the Unnecessary Things of Earth, and striving for the One Thing Needful, sets forth for the Consideration of the World." Well has it been said of this: "He has left no richer legacy. It is a solemn farewell spoken to the world by a grand old man ; it is an aged saint's anticipation of coming glory." It is indeed the fit expression of a character such as is beautifully summed up by the historian Palacky: "In his intercourse with others Comenius was in an extraordinary degree friendly, conciliatory, and humble; always ready to serve his neighbor and sacrifice himself. His writings as well as his walk and conversation show the depth of his feelings, his goodness, his uprightness, and fear of God. He never cast back upon his opponents what they meted out to him. He never condemned, no matter how great the injustice which he was made to suffer. At all times, with fullest resignation, whether joy or sorrow was his portion, he honored and praised the Lord."

It is a satisfaction to know that the hopes and prophecies of this servant of God were, partially at least, fulfilled not many years after he himself had passed away, and that his own writings had so much to do with bringing that fulfillment about. Refugees from each of the eight congregations to whom his Catechism had been addressed by name helped to organize the Renewed Unitas Fratrum, soon after the beginning of Herrnhut in 1722; while the very aim with which his "Ratio Disciplinæ" had been republished was reached when Count Zinzendorf by reading it was constrained, as he himself tells us, to devote himself to the upbuilding of the Church on its original foundations. Moreover, through Bishop Jablonsky, Comenius's grandson, the last Bishop of the Ancient Church, whom he had helped to consecrate in 1662, the Episcopal succession was handed down to the Renewed Church, when he consecrated David Nitschman its first Bishop in 1735, but sixty-four years after the venerable saint had gone up higher, on November 15, 1670, in the seventy-ninth year of his pilgrimage, at Amsterdam. In the neighboring town of Naarden his dust lies buried, under the floor of the military barracks there, with no memorial of any kind, not even a tombstone to mark the spot-nor need of one-where lies he of whom we may as truly say as did Ben Jonson of Shakespeare,

"Thou art a monument without a tomb,

And art alive still, while thy work doth live,
And we have wits to read, and praise to give."

II.

THE TEXT-BOOKS OF COMENIUS.

BY SUPT. WILLIAM H. MAXWELL, BROOKLYN, N. Y.

"The special aims of pedagogy," says Comparye, "are essentially related to the general aims of science. All progress in science has its corresponding effects on education. When an innovator has modified the laws for the discovery of truth, other innovators appear, who modify, in their turn, the rules for instruction." Comenius was such an innovator. Men had been studying words without meanings, propositions without contents, and abstractions without realities. Francis Bacon had turned their intellectual efforts in another direction, toward the observation of nature, the study of concrete things, the formulation of laws not deduced from barren abstractions, but generalized from, and verified by, experience. Comenius sought to apply the rules of the Baconian philosophy to education. What his system is, what are the principles of his educational philosophy, will be set forth by Dr. Butler. As a prelude to his address, I have the honor to invite your attention for a few minutes to the school text-books Comenius wrote and left behind as a monument to his genius and his industry.

"Latin," says Comenius, "is the one language to be preferred to all others for schools, because it is the vehicle not only of Roman, but of all learning, and because it is the common language of the learned." But in what a deplorable condition was the teaching of Latin when Comenius first addressed himself to its reform? In 1614 Eilhardus Lubinus, an eminent theologian who edited the Greek Testament in three languages, as quoted by Professor Laurie, says of the teaching of Latin in his day: "When considering this matter I have, to speak the truth, been often led to think that some wicked and malign spirit-an enemy of the human race-had, through the agency of some ill-omened monks, originally introduced the method of instruction. And with what result? The production of Germanisms, barbarisms, solecisms, mere abortions of Latin, dishonorings and defilements of the tongue." In his Novissima Linguarum Methodus Comenius enumerates the evils of existing methods of teaching Latin. It is taught abstractly without a prior knowledge of the things which the words denote; Latin grammar is taught not only before a Latin vocabulary is acquired, but before the grammar of the vernacular is studied, and that, too, in the unknown Latin tongue; and, lastly, boys are compelled to take impossible leaps, from a grammar whose rules are meaningless to a literature that is beyond their comprehension, instead of

being carried forward step by step from the easy to the more difficult, from the simple to the complex.

To remedy these evils Comenius projected, in 1628, a first Latin book in which, to quote his own words as given by Professor Laurie, "all things, the properties of things, and actions and passions of things, should be presented, and to each should be assigned its own proper word, believing that in one and the same book the whole connected series of things might be surveyed historically, and the whole fabric of things and words reduced to one continuous context."

While meditating on this project, there fell into his hands a book which, he tells us, made him leap for joy. It was the Janua Linguarum, written by William Bath, an Irishman, born in Dublin, who was educated at Bauvais and Padua, and who spent the greater part of his mature years as Spiritual Father to the Irish Jesuit College at Salamanca, in Spain. This book was an attempt to arrange in twelve hundred short sentences all the common root-words in the Latin language. No word was repeated, and the Latin was accompanied by a word-for-word Spanish translation. This work, however, upon examination, did not satisfy the Moravian scholar, as it did not even pretend to connect the study of words with the study of things. And so, in 1631, he published his Janua Lingua Latina Reserata. The full title is: "The Gate of Languages Unlocked; or, The Seminary of all Languages and Sciences;" that is, a compendious method of learning Latin, or any other tongue, along with the elements of all the sciences and arts, comprehended under a hundred chapter-headings and in a thousand sentences. The thousand sentences comprehended eight thousand different words, the Latin and the German equivalents being in parallel columns.

The sentences are simple at first, but afterward complex and compound. The subjects treated range from herbs and shrubs to dialectic, rhetoric, and geometry. The book was immensely popular, and was soon translated into nearly all the European and some Asiatic tongues. The "Vestibulum," an easier book on the same plan, was published in 1632 as an introduction to the "Janua." To the second edition of the latter work an easy grammar and an etymological lexicon were attached. The next book of the series, the "Atrium," in which the sentences are longer and more involved than in the "Janua" and "Vestibulum," is intended to serve as an introduction to the highest book of the series, the "Palatium ; or, Palace of Authors.”

Comenius not only wrote text-books, but he laid down strict rules for the method of study. I summarize the account of his method from Professor Laurie's exhaustive treatise on his life and writings. Each book was to be read ten times. At the second reading the whole should be written out, vernacular and Latin, and the teacher should begin to converse with his pupils in the Latin tongue. At the third reading the