Page:The letters of John Hus.djvu/46

 writings of the great English heresiarch were introduced into Bohemia cannot now be determined, and for our present purpose is not material. Suffice that in the Fall of 1401 Jerome of Prague, who in 1398 had obtained his licentiate at the University of Prague, and permission to go abroad, came back from Oxford, bringing with him copies of Wyclif’s Dialogue and Trialogue, together with some other lesser works. All these Jerome had written out with his own hand. ‘Young men and students,’ he said in a public disputation, ‘who did not study the books of Wyclif would never find the true root of knowledge.’ With this conviction he introduced the works to John Christian of Prachaticz and John Hus. Hus was, however, already acquainted with the purely philosophical treatises of Wyclif. Of this we have evidence in the five tractates of Wyclif now in the Royal Library at Stockholm, written out by Hus ‘with his own hand in 1398,’ and carried off by the Swedes in 1648 as part of the spoils of the Bohemian War.

Before long the strife over Wyclif had broken out in Bohemia. In April 1403 Hus ceased to be the rector of the University, and Walter Harrasser, a German, was elected in his place. On May 28, 1403, the new rector, at the instance of the chapter of Prague—for the archbishopric at this time was still vacant—issued an order forbidding any discussion of the twenty-four articles from Wyclif’s works already condemned in England at the famous Blackfriars or Earthquake Synod (May 21, 1382). To these were further added twenty-one articles extracted by Hübner, a Silesian master. The prohibition remained a dead letter, though, as we shall