Page:John Huss, his life, teachings and death, after five hundred years.pdf/289

 teenth century, was the standard of judgment. Huss practically ignored the church authorities. He refused to obey the citation to Rome. He went on preaching in spite of excommunication and interdict. He welcomed a general council, and yet refused to obey the mandate of the council to recant when it met. The priestly vow made him subject to the discipline of the higher court. That was the theory of the mediæval church, and the higher church authority sat upon his case and sentenced him. But it sentenced him not alone for contumacy to authority but for doctrinal aberration. Some of the charges were erroneous, as the charge that he held to the remanence of the bread after the words of institution; the charge that he had made himself a member of the Godhead grotesque. But other charges certainly were grossly heretical in the judgment of the council and the churchmen of that day. The death sentence was inevitable and Huss started out for Constance prepared to have such a sentence pronounced. The fault was not with the judges but with the system and the sentiment of the age. Bishop Creighton has well said: “No doubt Huss’s Bohemian foes did their best to ruin him, but his opinions were judged by the council to be subversive of the ecclesiastical system, and when he refused to submit to that decision, he was necessarily regarded as an obstinate heretic.”

The question whether the judgment upon Huss might not be officially reversed, as has been the judgment upon Joan of Arc, was opened in 1869 by Doctor Kalousek, a professor in the university of Prague, in a communication addressed to the Prague press. Doctor Anton Lenz replied that Huss was a heretic, and the sentence could not be changed. A difference in the two cases is that Joan was condemned by a commission of bishops; Huss by a general council. It may