14
COMENIUS
gain to all Europe if Mulcaster had been followed instead of Sturm. He was one of the earliest advocates of the use of English instead of Latin, and good reading and writing in English were to be secured before Latin was begun.”
These were some of the voices raised against the bookish classical learning of the sixteenth century; but it remained for Vives, Bacon, and Ratke to convince Europe of the insufficiency of the humanistic ideal, and for Comenius, the evangelist of modern pedagogy, to bring about the necessary reforms. The part played by each in the transition from humanism to realism, from classical learning and philology to modern thought and the natural sciences, will be briefly traced in the succeeding chapters of this work.
