Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/421

405 palace, upwards of 200 volumes of the writings of Wickliffe, while he pronounced solemn sentence of excommunication against Huss and certain of his friends, who had in the meantime again protested and appealed to the new pope (John XXI1L). Again the populace rose on behalf of their hero, who, in his turn, strong in the conscientious conviction that : in the things which pertain to salvation God is to be obeyed rather than man,&quot; continued unin terruptedly to preach in the Bethlehem Chapel, and in the university began publicly to defend the so-called heretical treatises of WicklitFe, while from king and queen, nobles and burghers, a petition was sent to Rome praying that the condemnation and prohibition in the bull of Alexander V. might be quashed. Negotiations were carried on for some months, but in vain; in March 1411 the ban was anew pronounced upon Huss as a disobedient son of the church, while the magistrates and councillors of Prague who had favoured him were threatened with a similar penalty in case of their giving him a contumacious support. Ultimately the whole city, which continued to harbour him, was laid under interdict; yet he went on preaching, and masses were celebrated as usual, so that at the date of Archbishop Sbynko s death in September 1411, it seemed as if the utmost efforts of ecclesiastical authority had resulted in absolute failure. The struggle, however, entered on a new phase with the appearance at Prague in May 1412 of the papal emissary charged with the proclamation of the papal bulls by which a religious war was decreed against the excommunicated King Ladislaus of Naples, and indulgence was promised to all who should take part in it, on terms similar to those which had been enjoyed by the earlier crusaders to the Holy Land. By his bold and thorough-going opposition to this mode of procedure against Ladislaus, and still more by his doctrine that indulgence could never be sold without simony, and could not be lawfully granted by the church except on condition of genuine contrition and repentance, Huss at last isolated himself, not only from the archiepiscopal party under Albik of Unitschow, but also from the theological faculty of the university, and especially from such men as Stanislaus of Znaim and Stephen Paletz, who until then had been his chief supporters. A popular demonstration, in which the papal bulls had been paraded through the streets with circumstances of peculiar ignominy and finally burnt, led to intervention by Wenceslaus on behalf of public order ; three young men, for having openly asserted the unlawfulness of the papal indulgence after | silence had been enjoined, were sentenced to death (June i 1412); the excommunication against Huss was renewed, j and the interdict again laid on all places which should j give him shelter, a measure which now began to be more strictly regarded by the clergy, so that in the following December he had no alternative but to yield to the express wish of the king by temporarily withdrawing from Prague. A provincial synod, held at the instance of Wenceslaus in February 1413, broke up without having reached any practical result ; and the labours of a commission appointed shortly afterwards were equally unsuccessful in the attempt to bring about a reconciliation between Huss and his ad versaries. The so-called heretic meanwhile spent his time partly at Kozihradek, some 45 miles south of Prague, and partly at Krakowitz in the immediate neighbourhood of the capital, sometimes varying the monotony of his life with an occasional course of open-air preaching, but finding his chief employment in maintaining with his numerous friends that copious correspondence of which some precious fragments still are extant, and in the composition of the largest and most exhaustive of all his printed works, the De Ecdesia, which subsequently furnished most of the material for the capitil charges brought against him. 405 During the year 1413 the arrangements for the meeting of a general council at Constance were agreed upon between Sigismund and Pope John XXIII. The objects originally contemplated had been the restoration of the unity of the church and its reform in head and members ; but so great had become the prominence of Bohemian affairs that to these also a first place in the programme of the approaching oecumenical assembly required to be assigned, and for their satisfactory settlement the presence of Huss was obviously necessary. His attendance was accordingly requested, and the invitation was willingly accepted as giving him a long- wished-for opportunity both of publicly vindicating himself from charges which he felt to be grievous and of loyally making confession for Christ. He set out from Bohemia on October 14, 1414, not, however, until he had carefully ordered all his private affairs, with a presentiment, which he did not conceal, that in all probability he was going to his death. The journey, which appears to have been under taken with the usual passport, and under the protection of several powerful Bohemian friends (John of Chlum, Wenceslaus of Duba, Henry of Chlum) who accompanied him, was a very prosperous one ; and at almost all the halting places he was received with a consideration and enthusiastic sympathy which he had hardly expected to meet with anywhere in Germany. On November 3 he arrived at Constance, and took up quarters in the house which is still pointed out (Paulsgasse, 328); shortly after wards there was put into his hands the famous imperial &quot; safe conduct,&quot; the promise of which had been one of his inducements to quit the comparative security he had enjoyed in Bohemia. Of this safe conduct, the formal words of which have often been quoted, it would be absurd to say that it was intended to guarantee its holder against the infliction of due punishment should he be convicted by existing law of any crime ; but there can be no doubt that both the letter and the spirit of it were scandalously violated, when on November 28 Huss was arbitrarily seized and thrown into prison before any accusation what ever had been formulated. Sigismund himself never sought to defend this act, which was not done with his consent or authority ; the only excuse he ever alleged for having tolerated it was that otherwise in all likelihood the council would have been broken up. On December 4 the pope appointed a commission of three bishops to investigate the case against the heretic, and to procure witnesses ; to the demand of Huss that he might be permitted to employ an agent in his defence a favourable answer was at first given, but afterwards even this concession to the forms of justice was denied. While the commission was engaged in the prosecution of its inquiries, the flight of Pope John XXIII. took place on March 20, an event which furnished a pretext for the removal of Huss from the Dominican convent to a more secure and more severe place of con finement under the charge of the bishop of Constance at Gottlieben on the Rhine. On May 4 the temper of the council on the doctrinal questions in dispute was for the first time fully revealed in its unanimous condemnation of Wickliffe, especially of the so-called &quot; forty-five articles &quot; as erroneous, heretical, revolutionary. It was not, however, until June 5 that the case of Huss himself came up for hearing ; the meeting, which was an exceptionally full one, took place in the refectory of the Franciscan cloister. Autograph copies of his work De Ecdesia, and of the controversial tracts which he had written against Paletz and Stanislaus of Znaim, having been laid before him and duly acknowledged, the extracted propositions on which the prosecution based their charge of heresy were read ; but as soon as the accused began to analyse them and to enter upon his defence, he was assailed by violent outcries, amidst which it was impossible for him to be heard, so that he