Page:John Huss by Hastings Rashdall (1879).pdf/9

 mechanical repetition of Paters and Aves, or by listening to the unintelligible, if solemn and imposing, Psalmody of the Church. But incomparably the most important service which the Bohemian literature of this period rendered to religion was the translation of the whole of the Scriptures into Bohemian, which appeared towards the close of the fourteenth century; and if Mr. Wratislaw’s account of the general diffusion of education among all classes of society during this period be not exaggerated, the Bohemian people must have been at least as capable of appreciating that translation as our own countrymen were of deriving benefit from Wyclif’s Bible.

At about the same time,—soon after 1360,—two great preachers established themselves in Prague, the German Conrad of Waldhausen and the Moravian Milicz of Kremsia. Conrad preached in German to the German townspeople and the more educated classes among the Bohemians, and in Latin to the students: Milicz preached in their native language to the masses of the people. The preaching of these men was on the whole characterised by a sobriety which was too often wanting both in the orthodox and in the heretical religious movements of the Middle Ages. Milicz was, indeed, a more excitable man, and a more sensational preacher, than the quiet, earnest Augustinian, Conrad of Waldhausen. He had experienced the full force of that temptation, by yielding to which so much of the piety of the Middle Ages was lost to the world. He had felt a strong desire to enter a cloister: but the desire was resisted. Instead of shutting himself up in a monastery which would have made him useless to his generation, or founding a new religious order which would have been worse than useless to succeeding generations, he established a school in which he trained two or three hundred young men to become preachers, who were afterwards sent forth, like the “poor priests” of Wyclif, to become instructors of those whom the parochial clergy neglected, and the Friars made a gain of. The preaching of Conrad and Milicz changed the character of whole districts of the city. A part of the town called “Little Sodom” was so reformed as to acquire the name of “Little Jerusalem;” and it may be doubted whether any Mission was ever attended with more extraordinary success. And from the fact that the preachers were permanently stationed in one town, this success was more lasting than was often the case with those wild outbursts of enthusiasm which were awakened by the preaching of the itinerant revivalists of the Middle Ages.

The almost universal sympathy with which John Huss’ protests against Sacerdotalism were greeted in the next generation, was due in no small measure to the discontent with the prevalent religion of form and ceremonies which was the inevitable result of the