Page:John Huss by Hastings Rashdall (1879).pdf/15

 by nations. Two of the four nations, the Bavarian and Saxon, were wholly German: while of the Polish nation more than half were Germans. The Bohemians were consequently outvoted; and the forty-five propositions were condemned. This condemnation of the great Realist raised the antagonism between German and Bohemian into a deadly feud. The clergy of Prague sided with the orthodox Germans; the King favoured the Bohemians from motives of policy, the nation at large from feelings of patriotism. The contest raged furiously for six years. Theological, national, and philosophical differences were each of them held a sufficient excuse for a free use of bow and arrows in the streets of a mediæval University. In the present contest all these motives were combined: it was a struggle between German and Bohemian, between Nominalist and Realist, between a Church party and a Reforming party. At last, in 1409, the Bohemians succeeded in persuading the King to issue an edict which gave the combined Bavarian, Saxon, and Polish nations one vote, while the Bohemians were to enjoy three. The Germans had taken a solemn oath that if they were deprived of their privileges, they would leave Prague in a body. They kept their word.

The inhabitants of the once flourishing town soon found that they had been gratifying their patriotic instincts at the expense of their commercial interests. For a time Huss, who was elected Rector a second time by the victorious minority, incurred some odium, even among his countrymen, on account of the part which he had taken in obtaining the edict; and in the Universities which were founded or largely augmented by the five thousand or more ejected Germans, hatred of Huss must have become a tradition. The national insult was wiped out at Constance.

During the first part of the struggle which ended in the withdrawal of the Germans, the personal orthodoxy of Huss does not appear to have been assailed. Zbynek of Hasenburg, the new Archbishop of Prague, showed as much reforming zeal as could be expected in an ecclesiastic in whose mind the interests of religion were subordinated to the interests of his order. At the beginning of his episcopate, he requested the reforming preacher to call his attention to any abuse in the diocese which fell under his notice. Shortly afterwards, Huss was one of a commission of three Masters appointed by the Archbishop to examine into the truth of one of those miracles for which the popular mind of the Middle Ages had an insatiable appetite. The church of Wilsnack had been destroyed by a robber knight in the preceding century: in a cavity of its ruined altar were found three wafers covered with a kind of red mould which often forms upon bread long exposed to the air. This redness was at once attributed to a miraculous manifestation of that blood, the “substance” of which was, according to the theo- 4em