Page:John Huss, his life, teachings and death, after five hundred years.pdf/169

 seem to be, the matter was quite a different thing in the fifteenth century. The pope’s right to fulminate censures had been treated as absolute. The method of the inquisition was to regard a heretical suspect guilty, laying upon him the burden of proving himself innocent. With us the relation is reversed; a man is treated as innocent until he is proved guilty. From the papal decisions there was no appeal. Absolute submission was the condition of religious existence and of life itself. To refuse it meant separation from eternal life as well as physical death.

In defending Huss, Jacobellus took the advanced ground that a process should follow the rules of Christ’s law, a course which would have carried the court back of the letter of the canon law. He demanded procedure against the clergy for simony, adultery, fornication and concubinage, and their renunciation of worldly goods and dominions. By their preaching, John Huss and his followers were laboring to secure obedience to Christ’s law. The ill fame of heresy, said to attach to Bohemia, did not hurt the kingdom any more than ill fame could hurt the true child of God. Bohemia cannot be hurt, if it has the peace and concord of the saints.

A memorial drawn up by other masters of the university denied the main statements urged by Palecz and Stanislaus. It opened by clearly repudiating the definition whereby the pope is the head of the church and the cardinals its body. On the contrary, Christ is the head and all true Christians make up the body. Nor are the pope and the cardinals the only successors of Peter and the Apostles. All bishops and priests are their successors. The “evangelical clergy” was right in pronouncing the condemnation of the XLV Articles unjust and pernicious. Obedience in all things is not due to the pope. Pontiffs have been heretics, have often recalled their bulls, err, and are often mistaken. Yea, a pope may be among the reprobate. The papal decisions against Huss were no more to be obeyed by the Prague clergy on