Page:Glimpses of Bohemia by MacDonald (1882).pdf/17

 influence of which has been permanent throughout Christendom. The Bohemian Church soon evinced signs of true Christian life, and we should all remember that within fifteen years of Huss’s martyrdom, the Bohemians sent a medical missionary, Paul Craw, to Scotland, who suffered death by fire at the market-cross of St. Andrews in 1431.

I cannot enter here into the details of the Hussite and Taborite wars. The Hussites fought against Rome and against Germany, they fought for the Bohemian nationality and Bohemian constitutional rights, the assertion of these rights being incidental to the assertion of their right to worship God according to their conscience. The aim of Huss was to win the people to true religion, and if religion is what it is intended to be, a guide and rule of life to men, it must affect their conduct in social and political affairs, or it is a very colourless thing. Consider how Knox and his coadjutors affected for good our social and national position, and how they are admired even by men who scout their religious views, and you can understand how the name of Huss is cherished by all Bohemians, although, to their own loss, not two out of the hundred now profess to follow the truths he died to maintain. With us it was the saintly Samuel Rutherford, best known, perhaps, for his letters of spiritual counsel to his friends, who first formulated the true doctrines of constitutional government, showing that the king existed for the people, and not the people for the king. So in Bohemia it was the pious Taborites who first asserted the same principle, and made a stand on democratic grounds against the unreasonable demands of the feudal system.

Men who, like Huss and Knox, preach the responsibility of the individual, necessarily spread a desire for instruction among the people they address, and whether they so willed or not would have been forced to be educationalists in a wider sense than that in which every preacher is or should be an educator. But Huss and his friends were fully as alive to the necessity of education for all as were our Reformers, and enjoyed an important advantage over Knox; for, while Knox had to devise and work out a national system of education, we find that by the time Huss came into public life every market town in Bohemia had