Page:The letters of John Hus.djvu/228

 along with Lord Henry [Lacembok], stand by my side without flinching till the end comes, when the Lord Jesus Christ will use me for His glory and the blotting out of my sins. I commend this most faithful of friends to you. I am pleased with what you have done. I should be glad to find that my lord the King had given orders for the hearing of my replies to the articles of Wyclif. Oh, that God might inspire his lips, so that he might take his stand with his leading men in support of the truth!

To-day I finished a little tract, On the Body of Christ, and yesterday one, On Matrimony. Get them copied hereafter. Some Polish knights have paid me a visit, but no Bohemians, except one that came with them.

The following letter forms a pleasant break in the records of Inquisition methods. To understand it we must remember that Hus, when a priest in Prague, had adopted a novel method of advertising his creed. He had found a use for the great bare walls of the Bethlehem Chapel. On these, in addition to the customary pictures, he had painted up sundry theses, once even a long treatise, On the Six Errors. This idea Hus seems to have taken from the practice in the monastery at Königsaal, the burial-place of the Bohemian kings. His enemies did not fail to sneer at his twentieth-century methods of advertisement. ‘You paint,’ wrote Andrew Brod, ‘The Ten Commandments on your walls; would that you kept them in your heart!’ (Doc. 519).

The letters, undated both in the originals and Palackẏ, would seem to have been written on March 4 and 5. We infer this from the last sentence of Chlum’s reply (see Hardt, Magnum Constantiense Concilium, iv. 52, and Finke, op. cit. p. 167).