Asiatic languages; bishop of the Moravian church,—Comenius and his writings were forgotten, and his name practically unknown, for two hundred years. Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler (13), in likening him unto the stream that loses itself in the arid desert and then reappears with gathered force and volume to lend its fertilizing power to the surrounding country, says: “Human history is rich in analogies to this natural phenomenon, but in Comenius the history of education furnishes its example. The great educational revival of our century, and particularly of our generation, has shed the bright light of scholarly investigation into all the dark places, and to-day, at the three hundredth anniversary of his birth, the fine old Moravian bishop is being honored wherever teachers gather together, and wherever education is the theme.”
Banished from his native Bohemia in early life by religious fanatics, he passed all his years in exile: now a teacher in Poland; now writer of pedagogical treatises for the educational department of Sweden; now adviser to the English parliament on educational topics; and now superintendent of schools in Transylvania (Hungary). Whether he taught in twenty cities, as Michelet maintains, and whether he was called to the presidency of Harvard College, as Cotton Mather asserts (but which the editor seriously doubts), does not concern the limits of this introduction. But that he was a great man in his own day, “a noble priest of humanity,” as Herder so aptly characterizes him, no one familiar with the history of pedagogy in the seventeenth century will for a moment gainsay. He had the ears of kings and princes in nearly every country in Europe; his books were translated into Latin, Greek, Bohemian, Polish, Swedish, Dutch, English, Spanish, Italian, French, Hungarian, and the Asiatic languages of Turkey, Arabia, and Persia; the governments of England, France, Hungary, Holland, and Sweden
