Page:John Huss, his life, teachings and death, after five hundred years.pdf/132

 argument that because the Turks, Tartars, and Saracens did not accept Christ as God, therefore he was not the Son of God. The burning of a man did not make his books heretical any more than the crucifixion made Christ a heretic. He challenged his adversary to show that Wyclif had held a single dogma at variance with the Scriptures. For thirty years, the English master had been read and studied in Oxford, so that Stokes’s statement that no one had read and studied his books without being seduced into heretical paths was not true. It was not likely that his philosophical books would contain a breath of heresy, but, even if some of Wyclif’s books were found to contain heresies, this was no sufficient reason why they should be burned. Arius and Sabellius, it was true, drew their false tenets from the Scriptures, but in so doing they had misunderstood the Scriptures.

If for no other reason, this rejoinder would be important for the three historical statements it contains and which have already been adduced, that members of the university of Prague had been reading Wyclif for twenty years, that Wyclif translated the entire Bible into English, and that Anne of Luxemburg, wife of Richard II, had taken with her to England the Scriptures in Latin, Bohemian and German. Huss’s words imply his belief that Wyclif was called heretical for having given the Scriptures in English. To accuse Anne of heresy for having translations he pronounced a “Luciferan silliness.” Altogether, Huss’s discussion with the Englishman, John Stokes, was a most interesting episode in the literary history of the times.

We now come to John XXIII’s sale of indulgences in Prague and Huss’s opposition which it aroused. As Luther one hundred years later, so Huss was forced into an attitude of open defiance of the pope by the sale of pardon for sin. No name of vender stands out prominently in Huss’s experience as does the name of Tetzel in the case of the Wittenberg monk. On the other hand, Huss at this point personally