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Updated: June 3, 2025
Be it understood, however, that the epitome takes account only of those works of Comenius which were written before 1639, without including the mass of his later writings, some of which were to be even more celebrated. The Didactica Magna is perhaps the most pregnant of the early books of Comenius.
And now for thirteen years, in the Grammar School at Lissa, Comenius devoted the powers of his mind to this tremendous task. What was it, he asked, that had caused the downfall of the Brethren in Bohemia and Moravia? It was their cruel and senseless system of education.
The story is told very minutely by Comenius himself. The Janua Linguarum Reserata was only a proposed improvement in the art of teaching Language or Words; and ought not a true system of education to range beyond that, and provide for a knowledge of Things?
Of these rumours, plans, or possibilities, due notice had been sent by the zealous Hartlib to Comenius at Leszno. Ought not Comenius to be on the spot? People were very willing thereabouts; circumstances were favourable; what was mainly wanted was direction and the grasp of a master-spirit! Decidedly, Comenius ought to come over.
Again Comenius introduced a new way of learning languages. His great work on this subject was entitled "Janua Linguarum Reserata" i.e., The Gate of Languages Unlocked. Of all his works this was the most popular. It spread his fame all over Europe. It was translated into fifteen different languages. It became, next to the Bible, the most widely known book on the Continent.
They were genuine sons of the Brethren; they used the Catechism of Comenius; they sang the Brethren's hymns in their homes; and now they were looking wistfully forward to the time when the Church would renew her strength like the eagle's. For some months they had made their native village the centre of an evangelical revival.
"I could not," he said, "read the lamentations of old Comenius, addressed to the Church of England, lamentations called forth by the idea that the Church of the Brethren had come to an end, and that he was locking its door I could not read his mournful prayer, 'Turn Thou us unto Thee, O Lord, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old, without resolving there and then: I, as far as I can, will help to bring about this renewal.
In Sweden especially there was an anxiety to have the benefit of the counsels of so eminent a theorist in the business of education. In 1638 the Swedish Government, at the head of which, during the minority of Queen Christina, was the Chancellor Oxenstiern, invited Comenius to Sweden, that he might preside over a Commission for the revision and reform of the schools there.
There Gregory the Patriarch had breathed his last, and there his bones lay buried; there many an historic Brethren's Synod had been held; and there Comenius took up his abode in a little wood cottage outside the town which tradition said had been built by Gregory himself.
Hence natural philosophy, astronomy, and theology are the pillars of anthropology, and ultimately of medicine. This fantastic physic of Paracelsus found many adherents both in theory and in practice. On Comenius cf. Beside the Platonic philosophy, others of the ancient systems were also revived.
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