Page:The Great Didactic of John Amos Comenius (1896).pdf/113

 The reaction was terrible. The remnant of the Moravian Brethren, who felt they had been duped, laid all the blame upon their spiritual guides. In Hungary, a minister who had been a keen partisan of Drabik’s was dismissed from his office. Daniel Comenius, anxious to go to Hungary, was warned by his friends that his life would scarcely be safe there; while his father’s efforts and sacrifices on behalf of his flock were forgotten in the virtuous indignation that was showered on his want of judgment. Worse than this, the dictionary-makers, biographers, and historians, who should have been the guardians of his fair fame, either took their impressions from the hostile tractates of his enemies, or, in ignorance of his theoretic works, measured his value as an educationist by their peddling standard of correct Latinity. “He worked at a Pansophia,” wrote Morhof, in 1688, “which he left only half finished. He wrote a Prodromus to it, and this, together with some other philosophic matter, he published at Amsterdam in folio.” “His Janua is full of barbarisms, which he tried in vain to defend; for his Apology stands itself in need of one.” He also wrote a Physic remodelled in accordance with Divine Light I praise the man’s piety, but piety alone will not do everything.”

The whole of his writings on the theory of education alluded to as “some other philosophic matter”! This is bad enough, but worse was to follow. The sceptical Bayle, writing in 1697, gets the greater part of his material from Des Marets’ Antirrheticus, and treats the angry retort of an antagonist as a reliable estimate of Comenius’ character. Des Marets gets a special word of praise. “On ne sauroit assez louer notre Des Marets,” he writes, “de sa vigueur contre les Enthousiastes et contre les annonciateurs de grandes révolutions. On a pu voir comme il poussa Comenius.” Of the Amsterdam folio he says, “C’est un ouvrage in folio divisé en quatre parties