Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 2.djvu/504

 ^gg BOHEMIA. to him, who listened to him kindly and gave him absolution with- out insisting on prehminarv abjuration, which was a most irregular concession— indeed, almost incredible. Many others were allowed to visit him in the hope of persuading him to confess and recant. One learned doctor urged his submission, saying, " If the council told me I had but one eye, I would confess it to be so, though I know I have two," but Huss was impervious to such example. An Enghshman adduced the precedent of the English doctors who had, without exception, abjured the heresies of Wickliff when required to do so ; but when Huss offered to swear that he had never held or taught the heresies imputed to him, and that he would never hold or teach them, his baffled advisers withdrew.* The most formidable effort, however, was of an official charac- ter. At the final hearing of June 8, Cardinal Zabarella had prom- ised him that a recantation in a form strictly hmited would be submitted to him, and the promise was fulfilled in a paper skilfuUy drawn up, so as to satisfy his scruples. It represented him as protesting anew that much had been imputed to him which he had never beUeved, but that nevertheless he submitted himself m everything to the correction and orders of the council in abjuring, revoking, and retracting, and in accepting whatever merciful pen- ance the council might prescribe for his salvation. Carefully as this was phrased to elude the difficulty, Huss rejected it without hesitation. In some matters, he said, he would be denying the truth, in others he would be perjuring himself. It were better to die than to fall into the hands of the Lord in the effort to escape momentary suffering. Then one of the fathers of the council- supposed to be the Cardinal of Ostia, the highest in rank of the Sacred CoUege-addressed him as his " dearest and most cherished brother," with the most honeyed persuasiveness, begging him not to confide too absolutely in his own judgment. In making the abjuration it will not be he that condemns truth, but the council ; as for perjury, if perjury there be, it will fall on the heads of those . who exact it. Yet Huss was not to be enticed with such allure- ments ; he could not quiet his conscience with casuistry such as this and he deliberately chose death. In daily expectation of the dreadful sentence, he quietly put his simple affairs in order. Peter
 * Epistt. XXX., xxxi., xxxii. (Monument. I. 67-8).-Von der Hardt IV. 342-5.