Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 2.djvu/497

Rh charge, submitted to the council, and was eventually, after a few years of imprisonment, rewarded by Martin V. with the lofty post of Dean of the Sacred College. Huss, with the constancy of the children of light, refused to perjure himself by confession, and there could be no escape for him.

The council had been assembled to reform the Church, and was performing its duty in its own way, but nothing could be further from the thoughts of its most zealous members than the revolutionary reform of Wickliff and Huss, which would reduce the Church to apostolic poverty and deprive it of all temporal power. Besides the doctrinal errors, attested by abundant witnesses, there was ample material in Huss's writings to prove him a most dangerous enemy of the whole ecclesiastical system. He had written his tract "De Ablatione Bonorum" in defence of one of the forty-five condemned Wickliffite articles which asserted that the temporal lord could at will deprive of their temporalities ecclesiastics who were habitual delinquents. His tract "De Decimis" defended another of the articles, contending that no one in mortal sin could be a temporal lord, a prelate, or a bishop. John Gerson, one of the leading members of the council, had, as Chancellor of the University of Paris, before coming to Constance, drawn up a series of twenty such dangerous errors, extracted from Huss's treatise "De Ecclesia," and had urged Archbishop Conrad of Prague to extirpate the Wickliffite heresy by calling in the secular arm. Huss, in his deductions from the Wickliffite doctrines of predestination, had overthrown the very foundations of the hierarchical system. Among the cardinals in the council, Ottone Colonna had fulminated the papal excommunication which Huss had disregarded; Zabarella and Brancazio had been actively concerned in the proceedings against him before the curia--all of these and many others were thoroughly familiar with his revolutionary doctrines. What was to become of the theocracy founded by Hildebrand if such teachings were to pass unreproved, if their assertor was to be allowed to defend them and was only to be adjudged a heretic when overcome in scholastic disputation? The whole structure of sacerdo-talism would be undermined and the whole body of canon law