Page:The letters of John Hus.djvu/44

 remained only dry bread for his support.’ In one of the intensely subjective epistles of his last year (infra, ), Hus reproached himself with his youthful levity, especially the time he wasted in chess, and his inability to lose a game without anger. Such reproaches, as in the case of Cromwell, Bunyan, and the Puritans in general, are rather the evidence of a tender conscience than of any real depravity of heart.

In 1396 Hus took his Master’s degree in Arts, and two years later began to deliver lectures as a public teacher. In 1401 he was made dean of the faculty of philosophy, and in the following year became the rector of the University, a position he occupied for about six months to the end of April 1403. Nevertheless, his achievements at the University were in nowise remarkable. Though he read the larger part of the course necessary for the degree in Divinity, in 1394, graduating as Bachelor, and in 1401 lecturing on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, he never incepted as doctor, while the wide knowledge that appears in his writings is but borrowed learning. Among his teachers at the University we may note with interest the name of Stanislas of Znaim, in later years his bitter foe.

In 1400 Hus obtained priest’s orders; his object, he tells us, was the comfortable life led by the clergy. Two years later (March 14, 1402) he was appointed preacher at the Chapel of the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem. To this church a dwelling-room was attached, from which a staircase led direct to the pulpit. This appointment gave Hus his opportunity. The Bethlehem Chapel in Prague—a vast building destroyed by the Jesuits in 1786