§ 55. Comenius was then neither a verbalist nor a classicist, and yet his contemporaries were not entirely wrong in thinking of him as “a man who had invented a new way of learning Latin.” His great principle was that instruction in words and things should go together.[84] The young were to learn about things, and _at the same time_ were to acquire both in the vernacular and also in Latin, the international tongue, the words which were connected with the things. Having settled on this plan of concurrent instruction in words and things, Comenius determined to write a book for carrying it out. Just then there fell into his hands a book which a less open-minded man might have thrown aside on account of its origin, for it was written by the bitter foes and persecutors of the Bohemian Protestants, by the Jesuits. But Comenius says truly, “I care not whether I teach or whether I learn,” and he gave a marvellous proof of this by adopting the linguistic method of the Jesuits’ _Janua Linguarum_.[85] This “Noah’s Ark for words,” treated in a series of proverbs of all kinds of subjects, in such a way as to introduce in a natural connection every common word in the Latin language. “The idea,” says Comenius, “was better than the execution. Nevertheless, inasmuch as they (the Jesuits) were the prime inventors, we thankfully acknowledge it, nor will we upbraid them with those errors they have committed.” (Preface to Anchoran’s trans. of _Janua_.) § 56. The plan commended itself to Comenius on various grounds. First, he had a notion of giving an outline of all knowledge before anything was taught in detail. Next, he could by such a book connect the teaching about simple things with instruction in the Latin words which applied to them. And thirdly, he hoped by this means to give such a complete Latin vocabulary as to render the use of Latin easy for all requirements of modern society. He accordingly wrote a short account of things in general, which he put in the form of a dialogue, and this he published in Latin and German at Leszna in 1531. The success of this work, as we have already seen, was prodigious. No doubt the spirit which animated Bacon was largely diffused among educated men in all countries, and they hailed the appearance of a book which called the youth from the study of old philosophical ideas to observe the facts around them.