Page:Guide to the Bohemian section and to the Kingdom of Bohemia - 1906.djvu/96

76 and secretly brought to Bohemia and Moravia to adherents of the Unity, who were still cleaving to their faith in spite of persecution, but bereft of liberty and made from freeholders of the soil to serfs, could not or dared not to emigrate.

Though the Unity excells without a paragon in the zeal and noble ambition to give the best to her beloved children, other denominations followed staunchly in her footsteps. There were three of them: The original stock of the Calixtines, or Utraquits, and their offsprings, the Evangelicals (Lutherans) and the Reformed (Calvinists). With the progress of the Reformation the Calixtines melted gradually into these two bodies, and at the end of the XVI. century they became almost extinct; the remmant (some noblemen) vanished in the Roman church. This dissolving process went on under the very eyes of the Utraquist Consistory, but neither of these two denominations was permitted to constitute itself into an organized body. They were nominally and officially Utraquists, though they have long ago abandoned the principles of Utraquism: reunion with Rome, the headship of the pope in the church, the roman ordination of the priests etc. The establishment of Utraquism (1484) was a bulwark against the Reformation and though Rome left it to perish by starvation, the kings held it up, and were meanwhile, together with Rome and the Jesuits, building up the Catholic church, a fort, from which to attack the heresy.

In view of this danger the adherents of the Reformation, by this time the entire nation, and the Unity, demanded the disestablishment of the Utraquism and the liberty of their Confesions in 1543, 1567, 1575 and achieved it in 1609, and united into one Evangelical church, the Unity being allowed to govern herself by her own Ratio disciplinae, which was in a great part also accepted by the other two denominations. This Union was celebrated in 1611. The Common Board of administration was in Prague. This United Bohemian Church (Standard: Confessio bohemica) was but of a short life. It was crushed in 1620.

These denominations, especially the Lutherans, published in the XVI. century a respectable quantity of Hymnbooks. Dr. Jireček says, that the Calixtines (the official