Page:The Great Didactic of John Amos Comenius (1896).pdf/25

 Gymnasium at Lissa consisted of four classes, and instruction was given for five hours daily. All the time that remained to him he devoted to the working out of his ideas. The Great Didactic, his Magnum Opus, for which he had already begun to make notes at Slaupna, now began to assume a definite shape, and in order that it might embody the views of those whose opinion was most worth having, he attempted to place himself in communication with Ratke, first ascertaining that he was still alive. But Ratke, who in his characteristics resembled a vendor of quack medicines, returned no answer to Comenius’ letter. Again he wrote adjuring him, by all that was sacred, not to keep him in suspense any longer, but to give him some details of the true method that he was reported to have discovered. Again he waited in vain for an answer, and it was not till three years later that a letter from George Wincler, pastor of Goldbergen in Silesia, explained the silence. The fact was that Ratke made as great a mystery of his method as was possible, and hoped, by judiciously concealing its details and advertising its merits, to sell it for a high price to some prince or noble. Without gold he resolutely refused to speak. “What hopes,” writes Wincler, “did not the pompous eulogy of Ratke’s method by Helwig and Jung arouse? But our friend Ratke preserves his silence, and will continue to do so. Mr. Moser, the chief assistant in our school, actually went to live with him in the hope of finding out the basis of his method, but came away empty-handed.”

As a matter of fact, Comenius was acquainted with many points of the method that was so carefully shrouded, and, though he cannot resist a sneer at the system and its pretensions, never forgets to acknowledge that it was Ratke who first fired him to attempt school-reform.

Getting no answer from Ratke he now addressed a