Page:The letters of John Hus.djvu/47

 see in the Letters, these forty-five articles played no small part at Constance. The whole affair, in fact, seems to have been an attempt by the German Nominalists to score over the Czech Realists, who for their part contented themselves with protesting, somewhat unfairly, that the condemned propositions—at any rate, the additions of Hübner—were not to be found in Wyclif. The struggle as yet was chiefly one of the Schools; for at Prague the constant fight of Czech and Teuton had passed into a struggle of philosophical creeds. Whatever the one “nation” espoused, the other condemned. The Germans had embraced Nominalism—of itself a sufficient reason for the Czechs to become uncompromising Realists and to rally to the defence of so thorough-going a Realist as Wyclif.

The leader of the Czech Realists at this time would appear to have been Stanislaus of Znaim, from whose teaching in the University Hus acknowledges that he had learned much. In a squib of the times we read:—

In the controversy on the forty-five articles Stanislaus defended the incriminated doctrines with warmth: ‘Let him who likes rise up and attack; I am willing to defend.’ He spoke so haughtily that ‘some of the senior doctors left the congregation.’ Shortly afterwards he published a tractate, De Remanentia Panis, and ‘argued boldly in the schools’ on the side of Wyclif. Stanislaus’s tractate was pronounced heretical by the Saxon master, Ludolph Meistermann—one of the leaders in the Secession of 1409. In