Page:The Net of Faith.pdf/61

17 last years of their 'pensioned' lives tenderly raising cabbages after they had spent a lifetime killing off their fellow men. Chelc̄icky̍ had no such distinguished past; he had his own small cabbage patch and he would have liked to tend to his plowshare and pruning hooks to the end of his life, had he not been horn in an age of political turmoil and moral crisis.

While Bohemia was being torn by interne cine religious warfare Chelc̄icky̍ quietly plowed his fields and watched with concern the storms of wrath ravaging similar fields of his neighbors and the fields and pastures of peasants all over Europe. He became intensely interested in history and its meaning, and especially in the Christian answer to history. He sought the answer in the Bible and he came to a conclusion which challenged the whole Hussite philosophy of life; it became unmistakably clear to him that there are only two choices before men: either they make life have meaning, a single purpose, comprehensive enough to embrace every human activity and worthy of man's highest achievement, or life will end them. He saw no middle course left. And a meaning as comprehensive as that can come only from a life which has its basis beyond time. If we were to put Chelc̄icky̍'s challenge into