Page:The Bohemian Review, vol1, 1917.djvu/29

 the great torchbearers of the Reformation. Their death inflamed the whole Bohemian nation against Rome and the treacherous Emperor Sigismund. The Hussite Reformation of Bohemia was the inauguration of modern spiritual life. Hus opposed the individual conscience and the Bible to the authority of the Church and of Rome, and thus became the forerunner of the Reformation; but his true significance lies in his moral teaching and death. There were many heretics before Hus: but Hus involved the whole Bohemian nation in his heresy, and as Rome, making use of Germany, tried to crush Bohemia by means of crusades, the Hussite war is a landmark in European thought. Bohemia held not only Germany but the whole of Europe at bay, and Žižka, the leader of the victorious Hussites, became the inventor of modern strategy.

The Hussite Reformation was essentially one of life and of morals. The Hussites became anti-clerical; and even to-day clericalism in Bohemia is considered the enemy of true religion. Being conservative in its theological teaching and radical in its moral endeavor, Hussitism soon became radical in its teaching also. The Taborites had already rejected all Roman teaching and ceremonial; they even accepted women as preachers, and in their zeal for Christian equality they adopted communism as practiced in the Apostolic Church. Hussitism reached its height in the Unitas Fratrum—the Church of Bohemian (Moravian) Brethren, the remnants of which are the English and Austrian churches of the Brethren, and the German Herrenhut Church. Their founder was Peter Chelčicky, who interpreted Christian love in its radical form of non-resistance, and thus fully anticipated Tolstoy’s famous doctrine. Chelčicky respected both “whales”—the Pope and the Emperor—Church and State alike, the whole theocracy and its clerical and official organization. His followers in the next generation were obliged to modify his teaching; amid the horrors of the war against Bohemia they doubtless confounded legitimate defence with force and aggression, forgetting that Christ brought not only peace but also a sword to defend truth and justice against aggression. But humanitarian endeavor remained the lasting foundation of this Church, which historians praise as the truest realization of Christ’s teaching. Amos Comenius, the great humanitarian teacher of the nations, became its last bishop, before it was crushed by the Austrian Counter-Reformation.

The Bohemian Reformation, as Palacky rightly observes, contains the germ of all modern teaching and institutions; it was an anticipation of the future, an ideal to be reached by future ages. But Europe did not understand Bohemia, and united, under the leadership of Pope and Emperor, to crush the nation which had dared to follow its own path.

Historians differ as to the origin and development of the Hussite Reformation. Some Russian and Czech writers see in it a revival of the Slav Church of Cyril and Methodius; others point to the great influence of Wycliffe and the West; while the Germans treat it as a national anti-German move ment. This last explanation is quite wrong. Hus himself declared more than once that he preferred a German who was right to a Bohemian who was wrong. Hussitism is the practical, political and social embodiment of John Hus’s command: “Seek the truth, hear the truth, learn the truth, love the truth, speak the truth, hold to the truth, defend the truth even to death.”

This deep moral reformation brought the Bohemians to love their nation, and to defend it against German aggression led by the Church; it thus became a barrier to the German Drang nach Osten, though it was not so much national as moral and religious.

Hussitism, chiefly in the form of the Brethren’s movement, spread to Slovakia and to Poland, and had a great moral influence even on the Germans. Luther himself, as is well known, confessed: “We are all Hussites.”

On the other hand, the later Reformation of Switzerland, France and Germany exercised a great influence over the Hussites, who to a great extent accepted Protestantism. Only about one-tenth of the nation remained in the Roman Catholic Church—principally the higher aristocracy.

3. The Hussite wars in the end weakened Bohemia. At the same time the Turkish menace against Central Europe induced Hungary, Austria and Bohemia to unite in a free federation (1526). At first, all three States remained entirely independent, linked only by personal or rather dynastic ties. Nevertheless their common King had behind him the power of the Empire and the resources of Spain, and thus gradually succeeded in his centralising and Germanising designs. At first there was only a com-