Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 2.djvu/493

Rh vain, shortly before his execution, his devotion burst forth in a hymn in which he exclaimed:

In vain during his public audience of June 8 he disputed earn- estly in favor of the same belief. The witnesses swore to the contrary. He had no right to call rebutting testimony, and could only appeal to God and his conscience. He was proved a heretic who must confess and abjure or be burned.

His only possible line of defence, as has been shown above (Vol. I. p. 446) would have lain in disabling the witnesses for mortal enmity—for enmity such as would lead them to seek his life—and even this would not have been available against the errors which the commissioners had extracted, falsely, as he asserted, from his writings. As regards the witnesses, the commissioners made an unusual concession to him when, during his sickness in December, some fifteen of them were taken to his cell that he might see them sworn. Some of them, it is said, declared that they knew nothing; others were bitterly hostile to him. To this extent he knew some of the names, and others he was acquainted with because they were attached to depositions taken in advance at Prague for Michael de Causis, which by some means had fallen into the hands of Huss before he started for Constance. Some of these names, probably on this account, were attached to the article on the subject of remanence presented in the hearing of June 7, but in the final sentence no names are mentioned; the witnesses to each article are designated simply by titles, such as a canon of Prague, a priest of Litomysl, a master of arts, a doctor of theology, etc., and when Huss asked the name of one of them it was refused. This was strictly in accordance with rule.