Page:The Church, by John Huss.pdf/26

xxii through any prelatical command. Huss's own following was called the evangelical clergy—clerus evangelicus.

In repeated discussions, Huss made the clear distinction between apostolic commands, as contained in the Scriptures, and papal mandates. No bidding is obligatory which is not distinctly based on the Scripture—præter expressam scripuram—and, where usage and Scripture disagree, usage is to be set aside. In deciding what the Scriptures teach, reason is to be employed. But the safest refuge of the church, Huss declared, is no human authority but the Holy Spirit.

In view of these positions on the supreme authority of Scripture and the right of individual judgment, Bishop Hefele rightly declares that Huss was fully out of accord with the Catholic church and a true precursor of the Reformation.

5. To these fundamental principles Huss, in this treatise, adds another in which he also took solemn issue with the practice and the theory of the medieval church,—the death penalty for heresy. He calls it the "sanguinary corollary." In repudiating it,, he was setting himself against Innocent III and the great pontiffs who came after him and also against the theological statement of the Schoolmen. The execution of religious dissenters was begun in 385 with the death of the Priscillianists at Treves. Fathers of the ancient church exhausted the dictionary for severe words to stigmatize heretics. Athanasius called them dogs, wolves and worse. When ecclesiastical dissent reappeared in Western Europe in the twelfth century, the words, "compel them to come in," which St. Augustine used to justify physical measures to coerce the Donatists, were explained to justify the putting of dissenters out of the world. They were likened to scabby sheep and to the locusts of Joel hidden in the dust. Heresy was a cancer to be cut out by the extermina-