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 Indeed, the Council would have proceeded even against the king and queen had not Sigmund interfered.

These severe measures had no other effect than that the archbishop suspended the granting of degrees in the university, and also pronounced an interdict upon the city of Prague. This, however, was not heeded anywhere except in the St. Vitus Church on the Hradschin. The masters in the university, heedless of the orders of the Council, continued in their teaching, and from time to time gave their opinion upon questions of faith, the most important of these being that, according to Scripture, both bread and wine were necessary in administering the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper (1417).

The university declared Hus a holy martyr for the faith of Christ, and ordered that the 6th of July, the day of his death, be kept as a national holiday.

On the estates of the noblemen, the priests that refused to give communion in both kinds were driven away, and others called to fill their places.

Meanwhile, innovations of a more serious nature arose among the people of Austi, in the southern part of Bohemia, the scene of Hus’s labors at the time when he was exiled from Prague. Hus had instilled into the minds of the people the principle of referring everything to the authority of the Scripture, and they not only followed this principle to its ultimate results, but declared injurious all religious teaching not found in the Bible. They, therefore, abolished the great mass of ceremonial that renders the service in the Catholic Church so imposing. They would have no adoration of the eucharist, no mass, and no auricular confession; if a person was guilty of some crime, he must confess