Page:The Great Didactic of John Amos Comenius (1896).pdf/16

 characteristic was extreme simplicity, and their great desideratum to lead a pure life, and one as far as possible in accordance with the commands of Scripture, which they interpreted in their most literal sense.

It was in this atmosphere of free Biblical inquiry that Comenius was brought up, and the result of early training can be seen in his habit of appealing to the Scriptures on every possible occasion, and of proving his most technical propositions directly from their pages.

Shortly after his son’s birth, Martin Komensky left Nivnitz and moved to Ungarisch-Brod, where he died in 1602. His wife did not survive him more than a couple of years, and shortly afterwards his two daughters Ludmilla and Susanna died also. Comenius was thus left an orphan at an early age, and his guardians appear to have robbed him of any small fortune that his father had bequeathed. This was not the only manifestation of his evil star. During the two following years, while attending the elementary school at Strasnic, he made the acquaintance of Nicolaus Drabik. It was a strange irony of fate that a wanderer like Comenius, when only eleven years old and in his native land, should commence the intimacy that was to embitter his old age in Amsterdam.

From the point of view of positive instruction this early training was unproductive, and the Latin school at Prerau, to which he was not sent till his sixteenth year, appears to have been even less efficient than the other secondary schools of the age. Comenius however, who, as we shall see, was rather inclined to underestimate the educational activity of contemporary Europe, assures us that his experience was nothing exceptional, and that he was but one of the thousands whose youth was wasted in these “slaughter-houses” of the young. Often did his eyes fill