Page:Bohemia's claim for freedom.djvu/12

 those unparalleled struggles, the torch lighting the way towards that ideal goal, was the Book, which "the meanest Hussite woman knew better than any Roman priest." (Pius II.) The ancient Bohemians were very fond of discussing religious and philosophic questions. It was the disputation concerning the forty-six articles drawn from the writings of John Wycliffe, that enflamed the University of Prague and led to the subsequent disasters. Tracts written during the Hussite wars (1419-1468) were innumerable, and there are still hundreds of them existing, while the invention of printing rather enhanced than diminished the productiveness of the authors of the following age. The output of a man like John Amos Komensky is simply prodigious. And his works are not merely numerous, they are of an intrinsic merit and value. Peter Chelcicky, too, is on a level with the best pulpit orators in the church of all ages, and one of the most trenchant sociologists. The authors of the Commentaries to the Kralice Bible are firstrate theologians, and John Amos Komensky's works are of world renown. The Bohemians proudly call this era their golden age. But the anti-Reformation put a cruel stop to it, and stunned that spirited nation for centuries.

The orders dealing with heretics, which attempted to frighten them out of their belief and to beguile them of their treasures, were nowhere else surpassed in stringency. The hiding and reading of forbidden books meant death. The last victim of these execrable laws in Bohemia was the forrester Thomas Svoboda, sentenced to 8