Page:Adventures of Baron Wenceslas Wratislaw of Mitrowitz (1862).djvu/19

 cussion were Author:Jan Hus and of Prague. John Hus was born, in 1369, in the village of Husinetz, of plebeian parents in comparatively easy circumstances. He took the degree of Bachelor of Arts at Prague in September, 1393, that of Bachelor of Divinity in 1394, and, finally, that of Master of Arts in January, 1396. In 1398 he appeared as a public teacher in the university, and, in 1399, came to an open rupture with his colleagues in a disputation held at the parsonage of St. Michael, in the old town of Prague, through defending some of the principles of Wycliffe. He was, nevertheless, elected Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy on Oct. 16, 1401, and presented to the Preachership at the Bethlehem Chapel at Prague. In October, 1402, he obtained the highest academic dignity, the Rectorship of the University, which he held to the end of April, 1403.

Jerome of Prague was a member of a family belonging to the inferior order of nobility, and was several years younger than Hus, with whom he early contracted an intimate friendship. More vivacious and less steadfast than his grave and stable friend, he wandered through Europe as a student, and brought from Oxford several of Wycliffe’s works, which had been previously unknown in Bohemia. He took the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Sept. 1498, obtained a dispensation from the duty of teaching in schools for two years, visited the universities of Cologne and Heidelberg, and took the degree of Master of Arts at the University of Paris. He appears to have taken an ad eundem degree at Prague in 1407. He visited Palestine and Jerusalem, and was, according to his own statement, at the latter place when the first condemnation of Wycliffe’s principles took place at Prague in 1403, in which twenty-one articles alleged to be taken out of Wycliffe’s works were condemned, in addition to the twenty-four condemned in the Council of London, in 1382.