Page:John Huss by Hastings Rashdall (1879).pdf/10

 influence of really spiritually-minded teachers such as Milicz and Conrad of Waidhausen. They were indeed Bevivalists rather than Reformers. But in one respect they could not help being Reformers: they were both of them enemies of the Mendicant Friars. It was hardly possible in that age for a secular priest to preach at all, without trenching on what the Friars Preachers and the Friars Minors regarded as a monopoly of their own; and it was quite impossible for any one to preach a spiritual religion without preaching a different religion from theirs. The religion which the Friars preached, at all events to the laity, was a religion of bought indulgences, bought dispensations, bought absolutions, bought sacraments. In their view religion was impossible for a layman: it was an impertinence in him to affect it; all that he could do was to compound for not being religious. Against this system Conrad of Waldhausen and Milicz spent their lives in protesting. And by their preaching the influence of the Mendicant Orders in Bohemia appears to have been well-nigh destroyed; so that in the time of Huss they do not appear to have been powerful enemies. Huss was in consequence brought less into collision with the Friars than most other Mediæval reformers.

Conrad and Milicz died before Huss was born. But there was another remarkable teacher, who was still living in Prague when Huss took his Bachelor’s degree. Matthias of Janow was not a preacher, but a theologian or devotional writer. His great merit was the clearness with which he saw the necessity for a restitution to its original dignity of the oflice of Parish Priest. It was chiefly on account of their interference with the parochial system that he objected to religious orders and monastic institutions of every kind. And it is in respect of his emphatic condemnation of that mediæval distinction between the Evangelical “counsels ” and the Evangelical „precepts“ upon which the principle of Monasticism was based, that “it may be said,” as Canon Robertson remarks, “that the later reformer Huss rather fell short of him than exceeded him.” The general character of his aims is well shown by the following passage quoted from his principal work by Neander. “I have myself come,” he says, “to a settled conclusion that it would be a salutary thing, and calculated to restore peace and union to Christendom, to bring back the Christian Church to those sound and simple beginnings where it would be needful to retain but a few, and those only the Apostolical laws.”

However, the intense strength of conviction with which John Huss adhered to tenets which he had once embraced, more than