Page:Adventures of Baron Wenceslas Wratislaw of Mitrowitz (1862).djvu/24

 produced to him out of the Scriptures, the decision of which alone he professed himself ready to recognize. But he was never allowed to defend himself, or prove the innocence of any of his doctrines, being simply required to answer yes or no to the questions put to him. On the 6th of July, 260 passages from Wycliffe’s works were read aloud and condemned, and then thirty articles taken out of the writings of Hus along with the other evidence and the whole proceedings against him. Not only accusations, which he believed himself to have refuted, were brought against him, but even such absurdities as that he had represented himself to be the fourth person in the Holy Trinity. Sigismund blushed when Hus reminded him that he had come thither voluntarily under the protection of his safe-conduct. Hus was then condemned to be degraded from the priesthood, and delivered over to the secular arm. The sentence was immediately carried into execution, and the ashes of the martyr were gathered together and flung into the Rhine.

Jerome of Prague recanted on Sept. 10, 1415, relapsed again on the opening of a fresh process against him, and was finally condemned and martyred in 1416.

Meanwhile the favourers of Hus were splitting into two parties, that of the inhabitants of Prague—afterwards called the Calixtines, from Pope Calixtus III, negotiations with whom appeared at one time likely to take a favourable turn—whose views originated with learned professors and masters, and in the university, and that which arose from a spontaneous fermentation in the popular mind, which afterwards became known as the sect of the Taborites. The University of Prague took a middle course between the Fathers of Constance and the extreme Hussites; but on March 10, 1417, it spoke decidedly to the effect that, while those who received the communion in only one kind ought