Page:John Huss, his life, teachings and death, after five hundred years.pdf/81

 first, he thought himself to be in full agreement with the church’s teachings. In this he was mistaken, but his mental temper was antagonistic to the attitude of the Schoolmen, imposed by them and the popes upon their times. He was consciously a reformer of church discipline and morals, unconsciously a reformer of its doctrinal position upon the basis of Scripture, as he understood it, and as the supreme constitution of the church.

In 1403, after a year’s vacancy, the see of Prague was filled by the appointment of Zbynek Zajik of Hasenberg, whom we shall know here as Archbishop Zbynek. He was the fifth incumbent of the see. Two of his predecessors, Arnest of Pardubicz and John of Jenzenstein, were men of more than ordinary ability as administrators. One of them, Ocko of Wlaschim, was the first Bohemian to be made a cardinal, 1379. Arnest was bent upon church reform and his provincial statutes were long referred to as a code fitted to correct clerical remissness and vice. On occasion, Huss, who called Arnest “the holy archbishop,” referred to these statutes, as to the article ordering fornicating clergymen to be deprived of their living and expelled from the diocese, and archdeacons and parish priests who connived at such vice to be condemned as though they were guilty of the same crime. Zbynek was a soldier as well as a priest—no scholar—and the rumor went that he was unable to read. He is said to have been the last of the Bohemian archbishops to wield the sword and go at the head of armies. In 1404, leading the king’s troops, he dislodged the robber chieftain Nicholas Zul, and two years later engaged in campaigns in Bavaria. To Zul, Huss became spiritual adviser, accompanying him to the gallows. Such an influence did Huss exercise that the brigand asked the throng who stood by to pray to God that he might be forgiven.

An early distinction which Huss received from the arch-