Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 2.djvu/548

 232 THE HUSSITES. fruit If it be thus dissolved, we shall be said to laugh at God and man, and when there is no hope of our correction the laity will justly assail us, like the Hussites. Already there are reports of it already they begin to spit forth the venom -'^fj^"'^^. stroy us. They will think to offer a welcome sacrifice to God when they slay or despoil us, who will then be odious bo h to God L man,;nd whereas now there is little respect for us, here wiU then be none. The council was some restraint upon them but when they lose aU hope they wiU persecute us publicly, and the whole blame will be thrown upon the Eoman curia, which breaks up the assembly convened to effect reform. Latterly the city of Magdeburg has expelled her archbishop and clergy ; the citizens ^a^h witi wagons like the Bohemians, and are said o have sent for a Hussite captain, and they have, moreover, a league with many other communities of those parts. The people of Passau have driven out their bishop and are besieging one of his castles^ Both cities are near to Bohemia, and if, as is to be feared, they unite they will have a following of many other towns At Barn- be^ there is fierce discord between the citizens on the one side and the bishop and chapter on the other which is especially danger ous by reason of the neighborhood of the heretics. If the counal is dissolved these quarrels will increase, and many other com- munities will be drawn in.* MaMnc due allowance for inevitable rhetorical exaggera ion this picture is a true one. Hussite ideas were rapidly spreading tl'gh Germany, and finding a congenial soil in the aversion born of incurable clerical corruption. About this time Fehx Hemmerlin complains of the countless ««"^^f "«^Vo^Br and the emissaries who, every year, come from Bohemia to Berne and Soleure Numerous executions of heretics are recorded at this pLd in Flanders, where persecution had been for centuries aim- unknown, and we may be sure th.t Hussite -^^^^^-^^^^^^ busily carrying on an equally successful propaganda elsewhere^ If the hopes which werebuil^ontii^^ were destroyed, the Council of Basle were subsequently put in the Index Expurgatonus (Reuscl, Der Index der verbotenen Biicher, I. 40).