alleviated by the authorities at Elbing, who provided him with a house rent-free.
At last the long-expected letter from Sweden arrived. Hotton had made peace with de Geer, and the result was a remittance of 400 thaler. In his letter of acknowledgment, Comenius, with that simplicity which is his strongest characteristic, speaks out of his inner consciousness and assures his patron that what hinders him in his work is the novelty of his Pansophic system, and the effort to lay the foundations of truth without any sophistry.
It must indeed have been small comfort to de Geer, who was impatiently waiting for his school-books, to be told that their composer was engaged on a work destined to reform human affairs, and of which the Pansophia was only the seventh part.
In the following year (1645) Wladislaw IV. of Poland summoned a great religious conference at Thorn, and invited the various religious bodies to send representatives. The union of Catholics and Protestants had been one of Comenius’ favourite notions, but, on hearing that Dantzig proposed to send to the Synod two Lutherans, who had little in common with the Moravian Brethren, he decided to have nothing to do with it. Though the Brethren at Lissa had been very anxious that he should represent them, they excused him at his earnest request. “May all these sects and their supporters perish,” he wrote. “Christ, whom I serve, knows no sect.” In order, however, that he might have some reason for absenting himself from such a representative gathering, he wrote to de Geer, asking him to send a summons to Sweden and thus free him from the pressure to which he was being subjected. But de Geer dissuaded him from coming to Sweden until the war between that country and Denmark was at an end.
Deprived, therefore, of this excuse, and continually urged by his friends to attend the conference, Comenius gave way, and set out for Thorn. On his arrival (August 1645) he received a friendly communication from Hotton, warning him that de Geer’s patience was exhausted, that he
