Page:The Church, by John Huss.pdf/14

x and preaching in the villages and on the fields and active with his pen.

The œcumenical council, which was appointed to meet at Constance in 1414, seemed to offer an opportunity for a fair hearing of Huss's case and the removal from Bohemia of the ill-fame of heresy which now attached to it. For Huss's name was spread all through Europe and was scarcely less notorious than Wyclif's. Provided with a safe-conduct by Sigismund, heir of his brother Wenzel and of the empire, Huss proceeded to the council but, soon after his arrival in Constance, was seized by the cardinals and consigned to prison, where he languished till death put an end to his trials.

Examined by one commission after another, including among its members such eminent men as d'Ailly and Cardinal Zabarella, he persistently refused to abjure, unwilling, as he professed, to offend against God and his conscience. On July 6, 1415, the council in full session charged him with thirty errors and turned him over to the civil authority to suffer the penalty appointed for heretics, death in the flames.

II. under which the treatise was written. The immediate occasion of the writing of the Treatise on the Church was a document signed by eight doctors belonging to the theological faculty of the university, dated February 6, 1413. Its immediate occasion was the papal bulls calling for a crusade against that refractory Christian prince, Ladislaus of Naples, and the sale of indulgences on the streets of Prague. It asserted the duty of absolute submission to the commands of pope and other ecclesiastical superiors, condemned the XLV Wyclifite Articles as scandalous and heretical and demanded that the kingdom of Bohemia be cleared of heresy, if necessary by the severest ecclesiastical and also civil punishments. The Bohemian clergy and nation, it affirmed, were in complete accord in all matters of belief and worship with the Roman