Page:John Huss, his life, teachings and death, after five hundred years.pdf/131

 no matter how well disposed he might be, and however well rooted he might be in sound doctrine, could read Wyclif without becoming involved in heresy.” In a placard posted against the doors of the cathedral, Stokes disowned this form of statement and refused to enter into public debate at Prague on the ground that he was there as a member of an embassy and the audience would be partisan. At the same time, he signified his readiness to accept the challenge, provided the discussion was set for Paris or any other university, or appointed to be held in the presence of the curia at Rome. He also announced his willingness to meet the travelling expenses of any disputant, provided he were unable to meet the expense himself. He further stated that, when he was asked in regard to the opinion held of Wyclif in England, he had replied that he was looked upon there as a heretic, that his works had been burned wherever hands could be laid upon them, and that his opinions had been officially pronounced heretical.

Once again John Stokes and John Huss met face to face, during the council at Constance, when Huss disavowed the statement made by the Englishman, that he had seen in Prague a tract ascribed to the Bohemian master teaching the remanence of the bread.

The matter was not at an end with Stokes’s departure. After he left, Huss made an elaborate reply at the university. After detailing the circumstances under which Stokes’s statement had been made, he stated that not only did the honor of his own university, which had been using Wyclif’s works for twenty years, demand a formal rejoinder, but also the honor of Oxford and the honor of King Wenzel. He gave reasons for his hope that Wyclif was among the saved. The argument was false that because Wyclif was held to be a heretic by many prelates and priests in England, France, and Bohemia therefore he was a heretic—as false as the