Page:The Church, by John Huss.pdf/25

Rh Samaritan city. By tears and prayers and Christian ministries should the supreme pontiff and priests fulfil their office.

Along the same line of curbing the assumptions of the priesthood, Huss insists in this treatise upon the right of inferiors, including laymen, to examine the mandates of the clergy and ecclesiastical superiors before giving them heed. Even the civil realm has the right to punish priests and to remove them from their offices as did, so Huss affirms, Charles IV, king of Bohemia, and as Titus and Vespasian at God's command had done in destroying Jerusalem and the priests.

4. The Scriptures. They are the supreme rule of faith and conduct. This treatise and all Huss's writings abound in Scripture quotations. A charge made against him by Stephen Palecz was that more than any heretic before him, he had fortified his heresies by appeals to the sacred volume. Huss expressed his hope to die in the faith, but also that at the great judgment bar he might be found not to have denied a single iota of their contents. Charged with following Wyclif, he replied that if he accepted Wyclif's statements, it was because they were drawn from the Scriptures. The holy volume, he maintained, is a book of life, an animate thing. The priest's main duty is to set forth its truths and, in being true to it, it is not possible to incur damnation