Life and Works
22
are often merely pursuing ignes fatui. '
adds,
do
'
Nor
belong to that class of
I desire to
yet,'
he
men who
and the customary, spite of the indicaof God Himself, Reason, and Common Sense.' 1
cling to the old tions
Out of the Moravian evangelical soil he grew, and a in heart and soul he remained to the end.
Moravian
It is important to note this. We have already pointed out in the Introduction that the educational motive was
in the
Reformation age
first
and Me-
partly literary or Humanistic, but chiefly
lanchthon, religious
that of Luther
or
theological
:
in
the
second Reformation
Comenius belonged, the intense of opinion between the new and the old faith age, to which
fluence mainly of the Jesuits
element to the
education
wall,
made
Catholicism under the in-
keener by the reaction to
istic
conflict
had driven the Human-
and the theological aim
now almost wholly obscured
the literary.
in
The
torch of reason, lighted in the schools half a century previously,
was now darkened by the smoke of theoand disastrous wars. Comenius
contentions
logical
was, above evangelical
a genuine representative of the he was not afraid of science far
all things,
spirit;
he endeavoured to unite science and theology, but he did not fairly appreciate Humanism, and
from
it
:
accepted the products of the genius of past ages only His eyes were turned to the in a half-hearted way. present and the future.
At sixteen Comenius went, or was sent, to a Latin school, and in 1612, when he was twenty years of age, we find him at the College of Herborn, in the duke1
Lectoribus, vol.
i.