Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 2.djvu/467

Rh followers were excommunicated, and all who would not within thirty days abjure heresy were summoned to answer in person before the Roman curia. In spite of this Huss continued to preach, and when an attempt was made to arrest him in the pulpit the threatening aspect of the congregation prevented its execution. He appealed to a general council, and then to God, in a protest which, in lofty terms, asserted the nullity of the sentence pronounced against him. In his treatise "De Ecclesia," which followed not long after, he attacked the papacy in unmeasured language borrowed from Wickliff. The pope is not a pope and a true successor of Peter unless he imitates Peter; a pope given to avarice is the vicar of Judas Iscariot. So of the cardinals; if they enter save by the door of Christ they are thieves and robbers. Yet the clergy, for the most part gladly, obeyed the bull of excommunication, and Huss's presence in Prague led to a cessation of all church observances; divine service was suspended, the new-born were not baptized, and the dead lay unburied. At the request of the king, to relieve the situation of its tension, Huss left Prague and retired to Kosi hradek, whence he directed the movements of his adherents in the city and busied himself in active controversial writing, the chief product of which was the "De Ecclesia," which was publicly read in the Bethlehem chapel on July 8, 1413.

King Wenceslas had vainly tried to bring about a pacification of the troubles in which passions were daily growing wilder, complicated by the race hatred between Teuton and Czech. A confused series of disputations and conferences and controversial tracts occupied the first half of the year 1413, which only embittered those who took part in them and rendered harmony more distant than ever. In fact there was no possible middle term, no compromise in which the disputants could unite. It was no longer a question of reforming the morals of the clergy, as to the necessity of which all were agreed. The controversy had drifted to the causes of clerical corruption, springing, as Wickliff and Huss and their disciples clearly saw, from the very principles on which the whole structure of Latin Christianity was based. Either the