Page:Letters of John Huss Written During His Exile and Imprisonment.djvu/39

 them to the flames! But when John Huss said the same things, they dragged him at once to the stake!

The door was (once more) thrown open to similar events, by the indulgences which the Roman pontiff scattered with such profusion over the whole world, and by the jubilee which he instituted at Rome to build the church of St Peter: for the pope, amongst his other inventions, declared, and afterwards confirmed by his bulls, that the souls of such persons as, having undertaken a pilgrimage to Rome, should happen to die on the way, should at once take flight to heaven; and, in his quality of God on earth, and God’s viceroy, he orders, most peremptorily, the angels to bear such souls upwards on rapid cars. Tetzel, the bearer of the indulgences of the bishop of Mentz, in like manner taught that the souls would spring from purgatory to heaven, as soon as the clink of the money paid into the treasury should be heard; but when shortly after he was confounded and put to shame, he shut his impudent mouth.

It was to oppose such impieties, calculated as they were to disgust even a brute animal, that John Huss, preacher of the Word of God at the chapel of Bethlehem at Prague, put himself forward. He denied that any such power was given to the Roman pontiff, who, he boldly declared, might