other way; and in addition to this the priest-usher of one year developes with ease into the trained teacher of the next. But though we may grant the Jesuits these and other merits, we must yet recognise that their mansion stands far away from the high-road of true educational development. Leaving out of sight the carefully planned and narrowing onesidedness of the training they supplied, we shall only lay stress on the fact that they excluded the people from any participation in it. Among the upper classes the supremacy of Mother Church was to be promoted by the teacher armed with the methods of the Jesuit school; among the ranks of labour by the preacher, whose task was rendered easier by the prevalence of superstition and the limitation of knowledge. Very different was the ideal of Comenius. The day school open to children of every rank; the large class managed by a single teacher as the only means by which such schools were economically possible; the introduction of every subject of instruction that could free the understanding from sophistic habits and teach men to look facts squarely in the face—these were the goals towards which his efforts strove, and his historical antecedents are bound up with the great democratic movement of which the Reformation was the most striking manifestation, with the names of Luther, Sturm, Calvin, and Knox.
The conscience had been installed by the Reformers as guide, and its counsellor, the understanding, needed education. Good schools, and nothing else, could remove monkish ignorance from the land; and this truth Luther was not slow to enunciate. In his stirring letter to the Magistrates of Germany,[1] he exhorts them to erect and maintain Christian schools. “Is it not evident,” he cries, “that it is now possible to educate a boy in three years so that when he is fifteen or eighteen years old he shall know more than the whole sum of knowledge of the high schools and monasteries up to this time? Hitherto, in the high schools, and monasteries, men have only learned to
- ↑ ‘An die Rathsherren aller Städte deutschen Landes, dasz sie christliche Schulen aufrichten und halten sollen,’ 1524.
