Page:John Huss, his life, teachings and death, after five hundred years.pdf/350

 depended with their whole heart upon Christ, whom they sought to honor.

As it was Huss’s solemn hope that at the tribunal of God he might be found not to have repudiated a single tittle of Christ’s law, so, following St. Jerome, he expressed the wish that, as an old man, he might hold the faith he had been taught as a boy; and in that same precious faith he wished to die, even as every child of predestination wishes to die. That best of masters—optimus magister—the address Huss often applied to Christ-himself had suffered false accusation and bitter death. The disciple is not above his Lord.

After November 11, 1417, the church of the West was again under one head by the election of Otto Colonna—Martin V, to whom the case of Huss was fully known. It had been committed to him by John XXIII, and he had pronounced the first excommunication against the dead heretic. One of Martin’s first acts, February 22, 1418, after the council’s dissolution was the reiterated condemnation of the articles brought against Wyclif and Huss and the excommunication of all of both sexes who persisted in the pestilential doctrines of those heresiarchs and Jerome of Prague. Martin also called upon all men to seize the heretics, put them in chains and proceed against them with civil penalties.

In Bohemia, serious dissensions broke out in the ranks of Huss’s followers, which resulted in the development of two wings, the Taborites, who settled at Tabor with John Ziska as leader, and the Calixtines or Utraquists, so called from the fact that they distributed the calix or chalice to the laity at the Lord’s Supper. The city of Tabor was built near the site of Austi, the castle where Huss spent most of his semi-voluntary exile from Prague. The location, sixty-eight miles south of the capital city, was well adapted to be a stronghold, and