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 The Reformation of the Latin Church THE Latin Church itself was enormously affected by this mental rebirth. It was dismembered ; and even the portion that survived was extensively renewed. We have told how nearly the church came to the autocratic leader- ship of all Christendom in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and how in the fourteenth and fifteenth its power over men's minds and affairs declined. We have described how popular religious en- thusiasm which had in earlier ages been its support and power was turned against it by its pride, persecutions and centralization, and how the insidious scepticism of Frederick II bore fruit in a growing insubordination of the princes. The Great Schism had reduced its religious and political prestige to negligible proportions. The forces of insurrection struck it now from both sides. i ^ The teachings of the Englishman Wycliffe spread widely through- out Europe. In 1398 a learned Czech, John Huss, delivered a series of lectures upon Wycliffe's teachings in the university of Prague. This teaching spread rapidly beyond the educated class and aroused great popular enthusiasm. In 1414-18 a Council of the whole church was held at Constance to settle the Great Schism. Huss was invited to this Council under promise of a safe conduct from the emperor, seized, put on trial for heresy and burnt alive (1415). So far from tranquilizing the Bohemian people, this led to an insurrection of the Hussites in that country, the first of a series of religious wars that inaugurated the break-up of Latin Christendom. Against this in- surrection Pope Martin V, the Pope specially elected at Constance as the head of a reunited Christendom, preached a Crusade. Five Crusades in all were launched upon this sturdy little people and all of them failed. All the unemployed ruffianism of Europe was turned upon Bohemia in the fifteenth century, just as in the thir- teenth it had been turned upon the Waldenses. But the Bohemian