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 to be a prophet and am puffed up, but to show you that I suffered temptation both of body and mind and what I have been most afraid of, to wit, that I might transgress the command of Jesus Christ. The words of Master Jerome came to my mind: “If I come to the Council, methinks I shall never return.” Andrew the Pole, a worthy tailor, said to me also when bidding me farewell: “God be with you; I think you will not come back.” Beloved in God, faithful and loyal knight, my Lord John [Chlum], the King of heaven—not of Hungary—grant you an everlasting reward for your loyalty and the toils you undertake on my behalf!

From June 8 until the final scene Hus remained in prison at the Franciscan convent. As his letters show, every day he expected that it would prove to be his last. He little anticipated the four weeks’ respite, if such a name may be attached to the prolongation of his trials, cooped up in a narrow cell amid the sweltering heat of a June that drove Sigismund and others to seek a cooler retreat in the fields. This month's grace was not as a rule granted to the victims of the Inquisition, unless indeed they were condemned to linger out the remnant of their days in some lonely cell. But Sigismund and the Council were both anxious to obtain a professed penitent, whom they could send back to Bohemia reduced by his recantation to powerlessness. To obtain this end they exhausted, as the Letters of Hus show us, the resources of casuistry. Learned doctors and others plied him with all manner of ingenious illustrations, while great ‘Fathers’ of the Council went out of their way to offer him convenient ‘baskets’, in which, as Paul, he might be ‘let down’ over the wall. But to all their blandishments Hus stood firm.

The student should understand clearly, what Sigismund had shown that he for one did not see, the real point at