Consequently, Comenius proposed a thoroughgoing reform of the schools, to base them upon the Christian principle, and to introduce a change in subject-matter, discipline, and method of instruction. “All those subjects which are able to make a man wise, virtuous and pious” were to be taught; not Latin, as had been customary, but vernacular language should be the chief instrument of learning. “This education shall be conducted without blows, rigour, or compulsion, ... and in the most natural manner” (2: p. 233). The student “shall not merely read the opinions of others and grasp their meaning or commit them to memory and repeat them, but shall himself penetrate to the root of things and acquire the habit of genuinely understanding and making use of what he learns” (2: p. 234). As to method, the most easy, natural, economical, and efficient way of learning must be investigated and established. Method is the great thing in the pedagogy of Comenius. To find out the universal rules which can be applied to all pupils in all cases was his chief task, and herein lies the main contribution he made to the subsequent progress of educational art. He says: “The art of teaching, therefore, demands nothing more than the skilful arrangement of time, of the subjects taught, and of the method. As soon as we have succeeded in finding the proper method it will be no harder to teach school-boys, in any number desired, than with the help of the printing-press to cover a thousand sheets daily with the neatest writing, or with Archimedes’s machine to move houses, towers, and immense weights, or to cross the ocean in a ship, and journey to the New World. The whole process, too, will be as free from friction as is the movement of a clock whose motive power is supplied by the weights. It will be as pleasant to see education carried out on my plan as to look at an automatic machine of this kind, and the process will be as free from failure as are these mechanical contrivances when skilfully made” (2: pp. 248-249).