Page:John Huss by Hastings Rashdall (1879).pdf/40

 letters he prays for that intercession. He attached considerable importance to the doctrine of a Treasury of Merits, though he denied the power of Pope or Bishop to make any one a participator in those merits. He held that it was better to help the “sleeping church” in Purgatory by adding to the sum of the good works of the Church (which in his view meant holiness of life, and not Masses or “whole Psalters”), than to pray for its deliverance. The most important practical measure of Reform which Huss urged upon the clergy of his day, was the abolition of the thirty Requiems and other lucrative superstitions with which the obsequies of all but the very poor were celebrated. His teaching as to prayers for the dead is, if anything, rather in advance of Wyclif’s position than behind it. He declares that “neither the Prophets, nor Christ and his Apostles, nor the saints who lived just after their time, explicitly taught men to pray for the dead; but they taught the people very earnestly that he who lived without fault was a holy man.” At the same time Huss did not absolutely condemn prayers for the dead, although he thought it better that they should be offered on behalf of all the dead than for any particular person. He held that every Mass was “a sacrifice for the living and the dead;” but he unequivocally condemned all the mediæval superstitions which had gathered about this undeniably ancient, although post-apostolical, doctrine. He held that no Masses should be said specially for one dead person; he attached no value to the mere number of Masses said, and he held that it was simoniacal for a priest to take money for saying them. It is curious to observe how in his hands a belief in Purgatory becomes positively an argument against Sacerdotal pretensions: he condemned the Indulgences granted in favour of the dead as well as of the living by John XXIII., on the ground that such Indulgences would dispense with the necessity of purgatorial probation. In this as in other cases he rejects Romish doctrines just where they favour Sacerdotal pretensions, or, at all events, just where Sacerdotal pretensions become immoral.

He was, indeed, completely under the thraldom of the theory which erects an eternal, impassable barrier between the Priest and the layman. He adhered to the traditional distinction between the Evangelical Precepts and the Evangelical Counsels. Matthias of Janow had, however, taught him that the calling of the Parish Priest was higher than that of the Monk or the Friar. Yet he shrank from the assertion of Wyclif and of Nicholas of Welesnowicz, that it was lawful for all men to preach the Gospel, because he imagined that that would imply that it was obligatory upon all men to preach the Gospel. He contented himself with placing the Priesthood in the position which the popular Theology of the day assigned to the Regulars: for them the Evangelical