Page:The Net of Faith.pdf/157

63 but he attacked its juridical validity on ethical and Biblical grounds. It is a strange coincidence that both books, the and the  should have been published almost simultaneously. Each of these books, one written in humanist Italy, and the other in "heretical" Bohemia, represented a mighty blow at ecclesiastical imperialism and falsehood.

Chelc̄icky̍'s historic presupposition is wrong but his ultimate analysis of the secularization of the Church and its identification with the temporal power is correct. Mythologically, the Donation presents a profound truth. It was when the Donation took place, according to Chelčicky, that the "two great whales" – the Emperor and the Pope – entered the net of faith, "rending it in many places. Declaring the law of God to be the sole rule of faith and life, he postulated the abolition of all church institutions not compatible with this  The  was written  1440–1443 and the  in 1440. This represents another example of the phenomenon which Toynbee calls "simultaneous pluralistic creation" (, vol.III, p.238). If we tried to explain this incident on the basis of Toynbee's interpretation of history as  and  we might say that the challenge presented by the bankruptcy of official Christendom to the stricken and stunned population of the nations of the Holy Roman Empire was taken up by these two men; both men were launched by their parents on the conventional career of their society and class and generation; both showed their creative genius in rebelling against the outworn convention. .