Page:The letters of John Hus.djvu/124

 on certain features of his character and letters (infra, p. 249, ). On another occasion he even preached in the Bethlehem, whereupon the clergy at once renewed the interdict. Apart from these visits and his preaching tours, Hus spent his time in a lively correspondence with his friends, especially Christian Prachaticz, and in composing, as his answer to recent charges, his great work On the Church. Of this famous treatise, Dietrich Niem, the historian of the Schism, remarked at Constance that it ‘attacks the papal power and the plenitude of its authority as much as the Alcoran the Catholic faith’—a statement usually attributed, but wrongly, to Cardinal D’Ailli. But the De Ecclesia of Hus, as Loserth has shown, contains hardly a line, local colouring and polemics apart, which does not proceed from Wyclif. On its completion the volume was sent to Prague and publicly read (July 8, 1413) in the Bethlehem Chapel, on the walls of which the main positions of Hus’s pamphlet, De Sex Erroribus, had already been set up in large text. With the publication of this treatise there is for a while a gap in the letters of Hus. But one letter, in fact, has been preserved for us between this event and the preparations of Hus, in the August of 1414, for his journey to Constance.

The literary labours of Hus, among which must be reckoned many treatises in Czech, whose alphabet he reformed by his invention of diacritical signs, did not interfere with his toils in the gospel, for on leaving Prague he had felt driven by his conscience to resume his sermons (infra, ). ‘Hitherto,’ he writes, ‘I have preached in towns and market-places; now I preach behind hedges, in villages, castles, fields, woods. If it were possible, I would preach on the seashore, or from a ship, as my Saviour did’—an interesting passage with which we may compare a statement in his Letters (infra, ). He specially mentions as a favourite pulpit ‘a lime-tree near Kozi.’ One thing gravely distressed him. ‘Jesus went to preach on foot, not like our modern preachers, proudly carried in a carriage. I, alas! drive.’ His excuse is necessity. ‘I could not otherwise possibly get in time to places so far distant.’ In the stress which he laid upon preaching, both in his Letters and in his other writings, Hus again followed Wyclif. ‘Preachers,’ he said, in words which are an echo from England, ‘in my judgment count in the Church for more than prelates.’ But his power in the pulpit itself Hus owed to no man, and his love of preaching