pleases--by fair means or foul--was
shared by the innovators. By education, rightly conceived and rightly
applied, the enthusiasts dreamed that they could manufacture men, and,
in truth, the Jesuits had shown that a good deal could be done in this
direction. The new enthusiasts failed to see that the genius of
Protestantism is the genius of freedom, and that man refuses to be
manufactured except on suicidal terms. He must first sacrifice that
which is his distinctive title to manhood--his individuality and will.
That the prophets of educational realism should have failed to see this
is not to be laid at their door as a fault; it merely shows that they
belonged to their own time, and not to ours. They failed then, as some
fail now, to understand man and his education, because they break with
the past. The record of the past is with them merely a record of
blunders. The modern humanist more wisely accepts it as the storehouse
of the thoughts and life of human reason. In the life of man each
individual of the race best finds his own true life. This is modern
humanism--the realism of thought.

Yet it is to the sense-realists of the earlier half of the seventeenth
century that we owe the scientific foundations of educational method,
and the only indication of the true line of answer to the complaints of
the time. In their hands sense-realism became allied with Protestant
theology, and pure humanism disappeared. They were represented first by
Wolfgang von Ratich, a native of Holstein, born in 1571. Ratich was a
man of considerable learning. The distractions of Europe, and the want
of harmony, especially among the churches of the Reformation, led him to
consider how a remedy might be found for many existing evils. He thought
that the remedy was to be found in an improved school system--improved
in respect both of the substance and method of teaching. In 1612,
accordingly, he laid before the Diet of the German empire at Frankfort a
memorial, in which he promised, "with the help of God, to give
instruction for the service and welfare of all Christendom."

The torch that fell from Ratich's hand was seized, ere it touched the
ground, by John Amos Comenius, who became the head, and still continues
the head, of the sense-realistic school. His works have a present and
practical, and not merely a historical and speculative, significance.

Not only had the general question of education engaged many minds for a
century and more before