Page:Letters of John Huss Written During His Exile and Imprisonment.djvu/234

 St Augustin and Gerson. The boldest opinions of John Huss have, almost all of them found partizans among men whom Rome venerates as saints and learned doctors. But he separated from them upon two principal points: in his eyes, as in those of Wycliffe, the authority of the Church could only direct the faith and conduct, as long as the decisions of the Church agreed with the Scriptures; and the priest, whatever his external dignity might be, was not, in the sight of God, priest, bishop, or pope, and representative of Jesus Christ, but as far as he took for model and guide in his private life the example of our Saviour. These two capital points, on which repose all the doctrine of Wycliffe, are the real basis of all Christian dissent. Huss, as we stated in a previous work, acknowledged them without calculating their importance, without clearly understanding the abyss they opened between him and the Church of which he believed himself a member. His opinion on this subject strongly manifests itself in all the above-mentioned treatises. Even his adversaries are forced to admit that he derived it from the unshaken conviction that morality and religion are inseparable, and that they who have the mission of representing Jesus on earth could not desire or order otherwise than what God himself had willed and commanded.

On these two points, he goes beyond the limits of the