§ 17. After wandering for some time about Germany, and being prostrated by fever at Hamburg, he at length came to Amsterdam, where Lawrence De Geer, the son of his deceased patron, gave him an asylum. Here were spent the remaining years of his life in ease and dignity. Compassion for his misfortunes was united with veneration for his learning and piety. He earned a sufficient income by giving instruction in the families of the wealthy; and by the liberality of De Geer he was enabled to publish a fine folio edition of all his writings on Education (1657). His political works, however, were to the last a source of trouble to him. His hostility to the Pope and the House of Hapsburg made him the dupe of certain “prophets” whose soothsayings he published as _Lux in Tenebris_. One of these prophets, who had announced that the Turk was to take Vienna, was executed at Pressburg, and the _Lux in Tenebris_ at the same time burnt by the hangman. Before the news of this disgrace reached Amsterdam, Comenius was no more. He died in the year 1671, at the advanced age of eighty, and with him terminated the office of Chief Bishop among the Moravian Brethren. § 18. His long life had been full of trouble, and he saw little of the improvements he so earnestly desired and laboured after, but he continued the struggle hopefully to the end. In his seventy-seventh year he wrote these memorable words: “I thank God that I have all my life been a man of aspirations.... For the longing after good, however it spring up in the heart, is always a rill flowing from the Fountain of all good—from God.”[70] Labouring in this spirit he did not toil in vain, and the historians of education have agreed in ranking him among the most influential as well as the most noble-minded of the Reformers.