Page:John Huss, his life, teachings and death, after five hundred years.pdf/78

 Our record has come down to us certified by the seal of an imperial notary who was present. The presiding officer on the occasion was the Bavarian, Walter Harasser, who succeeded Huss as university rector. Instead of healing differences, as has been said, this decision was the real starting-point of the religious controversy which raged in Prague for a dozen years or more. Many of the articles concerned questions about which there was wide-spread unrest in the church, such as the nature of the eucharistic sacrament, the validity of prelatical fulminations, and the liability of clerics to deposition, even by the civil power, for unworthy conduct. The charge was made and properly, that some of the articles misstated Wyclif’s opinion and Huss wanted to know whether the falsifiers of a man’s teachings were not as deserving of punishment as were two men who a short time before had been burned in Prague for adulterating saffron. Stanislaus of Znaim went to such lengths in defending the articles that some of the masters refused to listen and left the room. Throwing a copy of one of Wyclif’s writings on the table, Palecz announced his readiness to defend it in the face of any one who dared to say a single word against it.

The obligation which Huss was under to Wyclif, for large paragraphs in his writings, will be referred to further on. It is enough here to say again that Huss was considered to be Wyclif’s faithful disciple. The Englishman Stokes represented this opinion at the council of Constance, when he said to him: “Why do you glory in these writings, falsely labelling them as your own, since, after all, they belong not to you but to Wyclif, in whose steps you are following?” Certain it is, that Huss was deeply infected with Wyclifism, and it was chiefly for his attachment to Wyclif that he got into trouble at Prague and was burned at Constance.

There is no evidence to bear out the statement, made by Æneas Sylvius in his History of Bohemia, that Huss had derived his views from the Waldenses. Æneas, who spent