§ 44. JOHN HUSS OF BOHEMIA. 365
and the traffic was soon in full sway. As Wyclif, thirty years before, in his Cruciata, had lifi:.ed up his voice against the crusade in Flanders, so now Huss denounced the religious war and denied the pope's right to couple indulgences with it. He filled the Bethlehem chapel with denunciations of the sale and, in a public disputation, took the ground that remission of sins comes through repentance alone and that the pope has no authority to seize the secular sword. Many of his paragraphs were taken bodily from Wyclif's works on the Church and on the Absolution from guilt and punishment. ^ Huss was^up:' ported by Jerome ..of Prag.
Popular opinion was on the side of these leaders, but from this time Huss' old friends, Stanislaus of Znaim and Stephen Paletz, walked no more with him. Under the direction of Wok of Waldstein, John's two bulls, bearing on the crusade and offering indulgence, were publicly burnt, after being hung at the necks of two students, dressed as liarlots, and drawn through the streets in a cart.^ Huss was still writing that he abhorred the errors ascribed to him, but the king could not countenance the flagrant indignity shown to the papal bulls, and had three men of humble position executed, Martin, John and Stanislaus. They had cried out in open church that the bulls were lies, as Huss had proved. They were treated as martyrs, and their bodies taken to the Bethlehem chapel, where the mass for martyrs was said over them.
To reaffirm its orthodoxy, the theological faculty renewed its condemnation of the 45 articles and added 6 more, taken from Huss' public utterances^ Two of the latter bore upon preaching.3 The clergy of Prag appealed to be protected "from the ravages of the wolf, the Wycliffist Hus, the despiser of the keys," and the curia pronounced the greater excommunication. The heretic was ordered seized, delivered over to the archbishop, and the Bethlehem chapel razed to the ground.
1 Huss' tract is entitled De indidgentiis sive de cruciatu papce Joh. XXIII. fulminata contra Ladislaum Apulice. regem. Niirnb. ed., 213-235.
' Workman : Hus'' Letters.
3 See Huss' reply, Defensio quorundam articulorum J. Wicleff, and the rejoinder of the theol. faculty, Niirnb. ed., I. 139-146.
366 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1294-1517.
Three stones were to be hurled against Huss' dwelling, as a sign of perpetual curse. ThusJ^ie Reformer had against him the archbishop, the university, the clergj^and the curia, but popular feeling remained in his favor and prevented the papal sentence from being carried out. The city was again placed under the interdict. Huss appealed from the pope and, because a general council's action is always uncertain and at best tardy, looked at once to the tribunal of Christ. He publicly asserted that the pope was exercising prerogatives received from the devil. ; / To allay the excitement, Wenzel induced Huss to withdraw ^ irom the city. This was in 1412. In later years Huss expressed doubts as to whether he had acted wisely in complying. He was moved not only by regard for the authority of his royal protector but by sympathy for the people whom the interdict was^depriving of spiritual privileges. Had he defied the sentence and refused compliance with the king's request, it is probable he would have lost the day and been silenced in prison or in the flames in his native city. In this case, the interest of his career would have been restricted to the annals of his native land, and no place would have been found for him in the general history of Europe. So Huss went into exile, but there was still some division among the ecclesiastical authorities of the kingdom over the merits of Wycliffism, and a^national synod, convoked February 13, 1413, to take measures to secure peace, adjourned without coming to a decisiop.
Removed from Prag, Huss was indefatigable in preacliing and writing. Audiences gathered to hear him on the marketplaces and in the fields and woods. Lords in their strong castles protected him. Following Wyclif, he insisted upon preaching as the indefeasible right of the priest, and wrote that to cease from preaching, in obedience to the mandate of pope or archbishop, would be to disobey God and imperil his own salvation. ^ He also kept in communication with the city by visiting it several times and by writing to the Bethlehem chapel, the university and the municipal synod. This correspondence abounds in quotations from the Scriptures, and Huss reminds 1 Workman : Hus' Letters, pp. 60, 66.