Page:The Great Didactic of John Amos Comenius (1896).pdf/66

 preparations for the dazzling of intellectual Europe with an octavo of fantastic philanthropy or of philosophic mysticism, but—to write school-books for the little boys in Swedish schools. True, he was paid. He was bartering his inclinations against coin of the realm, against the good gold that streamed from de Geer’s Dutch counting-house. He was going to do useful work. Europe gained far more advantage from his school-books than from the Pansophia that did but impart a certain dignity and finish to his didactic method. None the less, Comenius was martyrising himself. Money, sufficient for his daily wants, he could always obtain, and with ease. Of school-books he had written enough, and of school method he was sick unto death. It was the old story. The old inability, on the part of a versatile man, to realise his true vocation.

Musicians have hankered after brushes and palate, statesmen have grudged to public affairs the energy filched from literary pursuits, and Comenius, the inspired schoolmaster, wished to shut up his dictionaries and grammars and to philosophise about things in general. His Pansophia may have been useless; to the progress of exact thought it may even have been harmful; he may have been totally unfitted to attempt the welding together of a philosophic system; but this it was, and nothing else, that he wished to do, and this it was that he determined to renounce.

The reason is not far to seek. It was his steadfast belief, backed up by the prophecies of Kotter and of Christina Poniatowska, that his co-religionists would one day triumph over their enemies and be restored to their native land, and the agent that was to bring this about was Sweden, the great Protestant power of Europe. By thus linking himself with Sweden, by carrying out the wishes of de Geer, Oxenstierna, and Skythe, he was establishing a powerful claim upon the generous treatment that he believed the Swedes destined to accord to his countrymen, and making straight the path along which his Church was to march home in triumph. This was why he held himself bound to accept de Geer’s offer; this was the ulterior