Page:The Great Didactic of John Amos Comenius (1896).pdf/242



1. confident heading may seem too presumptuous; but I challenge the facts themselves, and, while I constitute the reader as judge, will myself do nothing but summon witnesses. I call a school that fulfils its function perfectly, one which is a true forging-place of men; where the minds of those who learn are illuminated by the light of wisdom, so as to penetrate with ease all that is manifest and all that is secret (comp. Wisdom vii. 21), where the emotions and the desires are brought into harmony with virtue, and where the heart is filled with and permeated by divine love, so that all who are handed over to Christian schools to be imbued with true wisdom may be taught to live a heavenly life on earth; in a word, where all men are taught all things thoroughly.

2. But has any school either existed on this plane of perfection or held this goal in view; not to ask if any has ever reached it? Lest I should seem to chase Platonic ideas and to dream of perfection such as exists nowhere and cannot be hoped for in this life, I will point out by another argument that such schools ought to be and have never yet existed.

3. Dr. Luther, in his exhortation to towns of the empire on behalf of the erection of schools ( 1525), asks for these two things, among others. Firstly, that schools may be founded in all cities, towns, and villages,