The great educational awakening of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the demand for equal, universal enlightenment as opposed to class education; for the upbuilding of Christian manhood; for citizenship instead of purely monastic and humanistic training; for the introduction of method and system into school instruction to remedy the prevailing chaotic condition; for a natural method in discipline as opposed to harmful artificiality; for making the vernacular instead of the ancient classics the basis and means of learning. These demands found expression in the writings of such men as Luther and Bacon, and also Vives, Ratke, Rabelais, Campanella, Andreä, Alsted, etc. Comenius studied the writings of these men with his judicious and comprehensive mind and, aided by his direct experience, built upon this study that great system of pedagogy, which Professor Laurie of Edinburgh, speaks of as “the only thoroughgoing treatise on educational method that has yet appeared in the history of the world” (11: p. 153). However much he may owe to his predecessors and contemporaries, he it was who gave a coherency and a larger relation to what was partially expressed by others; who carried into details and practical applications what before was treated only in a general manner. To restore fallen humanity to the image of God was the first and last aim of education as conceived by him. Thus, education and religion were one for him, as they were to Luther. His philosophy of education is, in its fundamentals, really nothing else than the most intelligent pedagogical application of the Bible. It may be called the pedagogy of Protestant Christianity. In the “Great Didactic,” Comenius begins by picturing in biblical terminology the destined glory of man. He is God’s likeness, God’s delight. For his use God designed the heaven, the earth, and all that is in them; to him alone God gave all those things in conjunction, which to the rest of creation He gave but singly--namely, Existence, Vitality, Sense, Reason. And to him, finally, God gave Himself in personal communion, joining his nature to His, for eternity. “Know therefore that thou art the corner-stone and epitome of my works, the representative of God among them, the crown of my glory” (2:p. 178).