Page:The Great Didactic of John Amos Comenius (1896).pdf/65

 his disgust that his patron viewed Oxenstierna’s advice with the highest approval. He had, therefore, no resource but to submit, and consoled himself with the hope that the task would only take him a couple of years, after which he might again devote himself to philosophy.

Preparations for the move, and a preliminary visit to Elbing, occupied the next few months. In Lissa he had to take final leave of his scholastic and clerical duties and engage some assistants to help him with the philological work in view.

At this return to philology his friends in England were indignant, and did their best to recall him to his former projects. “You have devoted sufficient attention to school-books,” they wrote; “others can carry on the work you have begun. The world will gain far more advantage from having the paths of true wisdom opened to it than from any study of Latin.” “Quo moriture ruis? minoraque viribus audes?” added Hartlib, more disappointed than any of them at the dissipation of their Pansophic dreams of the previous winter.

Comenius wavered. He still hankered after Pansophia, and sent Hartlib’s letter to Sweden in the hope that it might cause de Geer and Oxenstierna to alter their views. But a stern reply, bidding him to persist in his undertaking and complete the school-books, was all that he obtained, and with great unwillingness he set to work.

In the history of great renunciations surely none is stranger than this. We have a man little past the prime of life, his brain teeming with magnificent if somewhat visionary plans for social reform, a mighty power in the community that shared his religious ideas, and an object of interest even to those who may have shrugged their shoulders at his occasional want of balance. Suddenly he flings his projects to the winds, consigns his darling plans to the dust-heap of unrealisable ideas, and retires to a small sea-side town-not to meditate, not to give definite form to latent conceptions or to evolve new ones, not to make