Page:The Great Didactic of John Amos Comenius (1896).pdf/268

 lack of material to occupy, exercise, and educate our minds.

11. God permits opportunities to be fleeting, and only to be grasped by the fore-lock, that we may learn to seize them the very instant they present themselves.

12. Experience is deceptive in order that our attention may be excited, and that we may feel the necessity of penetrating to the essential nature of things.

13. Finally, judgment is difficult, in order that we may be urged on to eagerness and to continual effort, and that the hidden wisdom of God, which permeates all things, may, to our great satisfaction, become ever more apparent. “If everything could be easily understood,” says St. Augustine, “men would neither seek wisdom with keenness, nor find it with exultation.”

14. We must therefore see in what way those obstacles which God’s foresight has placed in our paths to make us keener and more energetic may, with God’s aid, be set aside. This can only be attained—

(i) By lengthening our lives, that they may be sufficiently long for the scheme proposed.

(ii) By curtailing the subjects taught, that they may be proportionate to the duration of life.

(iv) By seizing opportunities, and not letting them slip away unused.

(iv) By unlocking the intellect, that it may grasp things with ease.

(v) By laying a foundation that is not to be shaken, and that will not deceive us, in the place of a tottering fabric of superficial observation.

15. We will therefore proceed, taking nature as our guide, to seek out the principles:—

(i) Of prolonging life.

(ii) Of curtailing the subjects, that knowledge may be acquired faster.

(iii) Of seizing opportunities, that knowledge may be acquired without fail.