Page:John Huss by Hastings Rashdall (1879).pdf/43

 Holy Scripture: neither Fathers, nor Popes, nor General Councils. In so far as the Reformation was an assertion of the right of Private Judgment, Huss asserted it as fully and as clearly as any of the German Reformers, and far more clearly than our English Reformers. He expressly denies that any man, or any body of men, has a right to tell another what he is to believe: and he denies that it is lawful for any man thus to believe a doctrine upon the authority of another, or to say that he believes it when he does not. If this be not Protestantism, the word has no meaning.

But in spite of the clearness with which he asserts the right and the duty of Private Judgment, he certainly believed that his doctrinal system was as a matter of fact in perfect harmony with the teaching of the Fathers, and of the Popes and Councils of the Western Church until within a comparatively recent period. His Patristic learning was vast. But in reading the Fathers, his attention was fixed exclusively upon the Evangelical side of their writings: he entirely ignores that side of their teaching which supports claims of authority. It is difficult to fix the exact period from which he would have dated the corruption of the Church’s doctrine. For he was a consummate debater; and his knowledge of ecclesiastical history was very remarkable for those times. He was thus constantly able to quote the decretals of earlier Popes against those of their successors, of earlier Councils against later Councils: he delighted in refuting the claims of the Popes out of their own mouths. The Decretals, the Extravagants, the Canon Law, all furnish him with weapons against the claims of the authority which they were intended to support. But although in some of these citations he is certainly ironical, although sometimes he uses his authorities merely as argumenta ad hominem, he does not seem to have been aware to what an extent the right of Private Judgment had been denied, or how indissolubly the whole Church-system of the Middle Ages was bound up with those views of Hierarchical authority and of the Infallibility of the Church which he rejected. He does not seem to have realised that Doctors for whom he had the greatest respect, such as S. Cyprian, or Pope Gregory, or S. Bernard, would have rejected with indignation the claim of an individual priest to interpret Scripture for himself. Those writers who, apparently with a view of aggravating the guilt of his judges in putting him to death, have pronounced that Huss was an orthodox Catholic according to the notions of his time, seem to have been content to accept his undoubted belief in his own orthodoxy as a sufficient refutation of the charge of heresy. But the very fact that he should have maintained that he was orthodox and the Council unorthodox, shows that his mind was so wholly uncatholic in its bent, that he really did not know what orthodoxy meant.

From the point of view of the individual conscience, Huss was, as we have said, quite clear in his assertion of the right and even