Page:The Great Didactic of John Amos Comenius (1896).pdf/22

 cumstances and the forlorn condition of the Brethren, he married again. His bride was Maria Dorothea Cyrill, the daughter of John Cyrill, a Moravian pastor and a former senior of the Consistory at Prague. The members of the Unity cannot have been left entirely destitute by the persecution to which they were subjected, as Maria brought her husband a small fortune. The sequel proved that marriage at such a time had been far from prudent. In the same year the order was issued that all non-Catholic preachers and pastors were to leave Bohemia within six weeks, and a few months later another mandate expelled them from Moravia as well. Karl von Zerotin had great influence with Ferdinand II., but the Jesuits were too strong for him. He received a personal injunction to cease harbouring non-Catholics on his estate, and the twenty-four ministers whom he was sheltering had to conceal themselves as best they could in caves and forests.

The Brethren now recognised that all hope of remaining in their fatherland must be relinquished, and in 1625 sent Comenius and two companions to Poland to report on the advisability of their removing thither in a body. On the way the messengers made the acquaintance of Christopher Kotter, a native of Sprottau. Kotter was a prophet, and his visions and the announcements that he had to make concerning the future of the Evangelical Church were full of interest to the Brethren. Comenius, to whom anything of a prophetic nature was always an attraction, gave a proof of his remarkable energy by translating the whole of Kotter’s prophecies into Czech, a task which took him sixteen days. After a short visit to Berlin, where there were a number of Bohemian exiles, he returned to Moravia. During the next two years the Brethren held themselves in readiness to fly at a moment’s notice. The only incident of any interest is the appearance on the scene of a prophetess, Christina Poniatowska. Christina was an hysterical girl, only sixteen years old, and her visions, like those of Kotter, dealt with the speedy restoration of the Evangelic Church, and the cessation of