Page:John Huss, his life, teachings and death, after five hundred years.pdf/356

 burned to death at Constance, whose cause the ancestors of so many of them defended even to the loss of their lives.

All Protestant teachers and preachers were given, in 1624, a week to leave the country on pain of death. Bohemian and German Bibles and all Bohemian works published after 1414 were placed under the suspicion of heresy and burned in great numbers in the market-places and under the gallows. One Jesuit. Anton Koniasch, boasted he had burned 60,000 such books. Thus the Czech literature was threatened with utter destruction. Protestants had been forbidden all rights—marriage, worship, merchandise or making a will. Ferdinand’s vow to exterminate heretics, if in doing so he had to rule over a desert, was realized. More than 30,000 families, including 400 nobles, emigrated, and the Bohemian people, which at the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War numbered between 3,000,000 and 4,000,000, was reduced at its close to 700,000 or 800,000. The last of the bishops of the Bohemian Brethren, Comenius, died in exile in Holland, 1670. Hussites, if there were any who remained in Bohemia and retained their ancient faith, kept it a secret.

The Hussite spirit was crushed but not extinguished. Sparks burned again and turned to a flame in the Moravian church. In 1722 two Moravian families, led by Christian David, settled at Herrnhut, near Dresden, on lands set apart by Count Zinzendorf. From that spot as a centre this humble body of sincere Christians has illuminated the world by its missionary devotion, carrying the spirit and the teachings of Huss to regions of whose existence that good man never dreamed, even to the remotest ends of the earth and the most destitute populations—the islands of the West Indies, the Mosquito Coast, Greenland and Labrador, the natives of Australia, the lepers of Jerusalem, the table-land of Thibet. The sparks of the old Hussite flame also began to show signs of life in Bohemia itself after the edicts of religious toleration issued in 1781 and 1848. At present, the pastors of the