Page:John Huss, his life, teachings and death, after five hundred years.pdf/283

 no record of any one who was at once more honored at the court and more beloved by the common people. He was a prolific pamphleteer, and the two large folio volumes of twelve hundred pages with double columns do not exhaust his Latin works, not to speak of his works written in the Bohemian. His writings, so far as the Western reader knows, are the most stimulating and rich that the Bohemian literature has produced. His pen was adapted not merely to attract the popular hearing in a time of controversy; it also dropped messages of learning in his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter the Lombard, recently discovered, as well as in other writings. In his espousal of the cause of the Czechs as against the Germans, which brought upon him much opposition and justified him, as he thought, in fearing death at the hands of Germans, he was in the right. Prague was the capital of the Czech kingdom, and it was fitting that its university, no matter what the old charter was, should be controlled by those who were of the Czech nationality. Though he condemned intermarriages between Czechs and Germans, or at least demanded that the children of such marriages speak Czech, we must not on that account charge him with bigotry. Did he not also say that he preferred a good German to a bad Bohemian? For these reasons Huss lives on in the hearts of a large body of followers and also Catholic admirers in Bohemia.

For centuries his name was treated with obloquy by the population of his native land. Efforts were made by the Jesuits to entirely blot out his memory, or, at least, to cover it with such contumely as to make it synonymous with irreligion and the subversion of the true interests of his people. When Palacky published his History of Bohemia, that work was subjected to rigid investigation by the censor, and, on account of references supposed to condemn the religious authorities with whom Huss had to do, parts of it were cut out. The modern visitor to Prague always associates the