Page:John Huss, his life, teachings and death, after five hundred years.pdf/43

 mentary on the Decalogue that when he was a hungry little student he made a spoon out of bread and ate the peas with it and then ate the spoon also.

It would seem that Huss was not a remarkable student, as the university lists put him midway in the groups receiving degrees. A statement in one of his letters reports that, before he entered the priesthood, he was fond of playing chess, and he thought it necessary to confess that he had frittered away time and provoked both himself and others to anger over the game. University students at Prague had to run the gauntlet. It was a common thing for loose women to frequent the houses where students roomed and even to take permanent lodgings in them. It is fair to assume that Huss’s private life was above reproach. Even down to the last moments in Constance no charge was ever brought against his character. The withering public attacks he made against vicious clerics from the earliest period of his public activity failed to call forth a single charge against his personal purity. This judgment is also borne out by the warm personal friendship of people of all classes, which he enjoyed from the mechanic to the highest nobles of the realm, men before whom his life was as an open book. Æneas Sylvius, afterward Pius II, in describing Huss’s death, spoke of him as distinguished for the reputation of a life of purity—a remarkable testimony from a man whose record was marked by illicit amours, and who was severe upon Huss’s heresy and the Hussites.

In 1401 we find Huss lecturing on the Sentences of Peter the Lombard. A proof of the respect in which he was held was his election the same year as dean of the faculty of philosophy, and a still greater proof was his election, in 1402, to the office of rector of the university, a position he at that time filled for six months. The qualities of eloquence, moral elevation and personal magnetism ascribed to him at a later period must already have had prominent exercise to explain