Page:John Huss, his life, teachings and death, after five hundred years.pdf/137

 The third question was as to whether any of Pharaoh’s army drowned in the Red Sea or those destroyed in Sodom were saved. Quoting Jerome, Huss held it possible that some of those unfortunates were saved and that, without revelation to the contrary, mortal men ought not to affirm of any man that he is eternally damned. He maintains his view also on the basis of Christ’s words: “Judge not that ye be not judged.”

In his commentary on the Sentences of Peter the Lombard, Huss does not make it quite clear what his position was on the subject of priestly absolution. He says, p. 605, that “God gave to priests the power of binding and loosing; that is, of showing the men who have been bound and loosed, and that they bind when they impose upon persons who have made confession the satisfaction of penance and they loose when they remit something of that satisfaction, or they bind when they place under excommunication and loose when they release from excommunication.” This power is like the power which the priest had in the Old Testament in cures of leprosy—“they adjudge and show sins remitted of God.”

Huss’s theological colleagues at the university were now arrayed solidly against him. In formal meeting they charged him with proclaiming that the papal bulls were an evident token that antichrist was fully come, and the pope was to be resisted as the chief enemy and adversary of Christ. Huss’s announcement that he would discuss the subject at the university was met on the part of faculty with a petition to the