Page:The Church, by John Huss.pdf/39

Rh questions which had seemed to be forever settled before Boniface issued his bull. The discussions were participated in by a class of men of whom Konrad of Gelnhausen was one of the very first, and by Wyclif followed by Huss who constitute a much more advanced group. The opinions of the former group found expression in the Reformatory councils, notably the council of Constance. The opinions of the latter involved an ecclesiastical revolution and led straight forward to the Protestant Reformation.

The opening clause of Boniface's bull asserting the unity of the church, Wyclif and Huss both accepted, but they put upon it another interpretation from that intended by Boniface. The unity was not in the apostolic see but in predestinating grace as manifesting itself in the exercise of the Christian virtues. The other clauses they wholly repudiated, namely the clause that to the church is given both swords and the clause that it is altogether necessary for salvation that every creature be subject to the Roman pontiff. The latter repeats the very language of Thomas Aquinas. In renouncing these two propositions, Wyclif and Huss set themselves against the fabric of the medieval system.

It was Huss's merit that he kept open the subject of the church by his death and this treatise. He passed Wyclif's views on to a later time, and his volume was the avenue for their transmission. Huss's tenets and his memory, embodied in the Christian dissenters known as "the Bohemians," were a constant source of interest and of controversy down to the age of Luther. At the close of the fifteenth century, Wessel exclaimed: "The church cannot err, but what is the church? It is the ¢ommunion of the saints to which all true believers belong who are bound together by one faith, one love, one hope." The definition of the nature and the functions of the church was awaiting settlement, and the staggering blow to Boniface VIII's arrogance was given by the Reformation.

In view of our authorities, it would be false to say that