§ 44. JOHN HCrSS OF BOHEMIxl. 367
his friends that Christ himself was excommunicated as a malefactor and crucified. No help was to be derived from the saints. Christ's example and his salvation are the sufficient sources of consolation and courage. The high priests, scribes, Pharisees, Herod and Pilate condemned the Truth and crave him over to death, but he rose from the tomb and gave in his stead twelve other preachers. So he would do again. Wliat fear, he wrote, " shall part us from God, or what death ? What shall we lose if for His sake we forfeit wealth, friends, the world's honors and our poor life ? . . . It is better to die well than to live badly. We dare not sin to avoid the punishment of death. To end in grace the present life is to be banished from misery. Truth is the last conqueror. He wins who is slain, for no adversity "hurts him if no iniquity has dominion over him." In this strain he wrote again and again. The " bolts of anti-christ," he said, could not terrify him, and should not terrify the " elect of Prag." 1
Of the extent of Huss' influence during this period he bore witness at Constance when, in answer to D'Ailly, he said: —
I have stated that I came here of my owd free will. If I had been unwilling to come, neither that king [referring to Wenzel] nor this king here [referring to Sigismund] would have been able to force me to come, so numerous and so powerful are the Bohemian nobles who love me, and within whose castles T should have been able to lie concealed.
And when D'Ailly rebuked the statement as effrontery, John of Chlum replied that it was even as the prisoner said, "There are numbers of great nobles who love him and have strong castles where they could keep him as long as they wished, even against both those kings."
IDie chief product of this period of exile was Huss' work on the Church, De ecclesia, the most noted of all his writings. It was written in view of the national synod held in 1413, and was sent to Prag and read in the Bethlehem chapel, July 8. Of this tractate Cardinal D'Ailly said at the Council of Constance that, by an infinite number of arguments, it combatedJ-|he pope'^
1 Workman, p. 107-120. Workman translates seventeen letters written from this exile, pp. 83-138.
J
368 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1204-1517.
plenary authority as much as the Koran, the book of the damned jNlohammed, combated the Catholic faitli.^
In tliis volume, next to Wyclif's,the most famous treatment on the Church since Cyprian's work^^De; ecclesia^ and Augustine's writings against the Donatists, Huss defined the Church and the power of the keys, and then proceeds to defend himself against the fulminations of Alexander V. and John XXIII. and to answer the Prag theologians, Stephen Paletz and Stanislaus of Znaim, who had deserted him. The following are some of its leading positions.
/ The Holy Catholic Church is the body or congregation of all the predestinate, the dead, the living and those yet to be.^ Tlie term 'catholic' means universal. The unity of the Church is a unity of predestination and of blessedness, a unity of faith, charity and grace. The Roman pontiff and the cardinals are not the Church. The Church can exist without cardinals and a pope, and in fact for hundreds of years there were no cardinals.^ As for the position Christ assigned to Peter, Huss affirmed that Christ called himself the Rock, and the Church is founded on him by virtue of predestination. In view of Peter's clear and positive confession, " the Rock — Petra — said to Peter — Petro — ' I say unto thee. Thou art Peter, that is, a confessor of the true Rock which Rock I am.' And upon the Rock, that is, myself, I will build this Church. " Thus Huss placed himself firmly on the ground taken by Augustine in his Retractations. Peter never was the head of the Holy Catholic Church.*
1 Du Pin, 0pp. Gerson., II. 901. The De ecclesia is given in the Niirnb. ed., I. 243-319.
'^ Eccl. est omnium prcedestinatornm universitas ; quce est omnes prcedestinati, proesentes, prceteriti et fnturi. Niirnb. ed. I., 244.
3 Writing to Christian Prachatitz, in 1413, Huss said, " If the pope is the head of the Roman Church and the cardinals are the body, then they in themselves form the entire Holy Roman Church, as the entire body of a man with the head is the man. The satellites of anti-christ use interchangeably the expressions 'Holy Roman Church' and 'pope and cardinals' etc." Workman : Hus' Letters, p. 121.
* Propter confessionem tarn claram et firmam, dixit Petra Petro, et ego dic.o tihi quia tn es Petrus, id est confessor Petrce verce qui est Christus et super hanc Petram quam confessus es, id est, super me, etc., Nurnb. ed., I. 257. Petrus non fnit nee est caput s. eccles. cathnl.,i>. 263. See also the same interpretation in Huss' Serm. de Sanctis, p. 84.