Page:John Huss, his life, teachings and death, after five hundred years.pdf/12

vi domain, so far as human judgment goes, the criterion of a Christian profession is daily conduct—a criterion expressed in the maxim, often quoted by Huss: “By their fruits ye shall know them.”

Some will be attracted to Huss chiefly by the fidelity to conviction which he maintained even in the presence of a horrible death; others by those principles which he defined with more or less clearness and which were opposed to the system built up during the Middle Ages and abhorred by the churchmen and theologians of Huss’s own age.

From whatever standpoint he may be regarded, as a heretic or as an advocate of forgotten Scriptural truth, as a contumacious rebel against constituted church authority or as an advocate of the just rights of conscience, the five-hundredth anniversary of his death at Constance, July 6, 1915, will again call attention to his personality and his teachings and, as is hoped, promote the study of the foundations of church authority in such an irenic spirit that the cause of the mutual recognition of Christians, one of the other, may be advanced. Is it too much to hope that the solemn study of this man’s Christian aims and death may promote the disposition to regard with tolerance doctrinal errors when the persons who hold them are moved with devotion to the person of Christ and the promotion of good-will among men?

This biography is intended not only to set forth the teachings and activity of John Huss and the circumstances of his death but also to show the perpetuation of his influence upon the centuries that have elapsed since he suffered at the stake. “He being dead yet speaketh.”

In departing from Huss’s own spelling of his name—Hus—which is the usage in Bohemia, I am influenced by the fact that the form Huss is more familiar to our eyes and agreeable to our general usage in spelling. It is to be noted that Loserth, the author of the volume, Wiclif and Hus, has adopted the form Huss in his article in the Herzog Encyclo-