Page:The life & times of Master John Hus by Count Lützow.djvu/101

 doned at that time the very harmless frivolities in which he had previously indulged. Always a pious man, he now became a very fervent Christian and a very diligent student of theology. Hus’s alienation from the Church of Rome was a gradual one, founded on personal experiences as well as on the study of books, Wycliffe’s among others. The learned Dr. Schwab, in his Johannes Gerson, in which he incidentally gives an interesting account of the early studies of Hus, points out that he devoted much time to the study of the sentences of Peter Lombard and of Gratian’s Decretum. In the latter work Hus found many statements, such as that the primate had only been founded by the Emperor Constantine, and that equality had formerly existed between priests and bishops, which were entirely contrary to the teaching of the church in his time. Of Wycliffe’s works, also, Hus was an enthusiastic student. The writings of the English divine had from their first appearance attracted great attention at the University of Prague. Hus studied them carefully and transferred to his own writings many ideas contained in them, though, as already mentioned, it is always necessary to inquire whether the views expressed by both writers are not derived from a common earlier source. It is a proof of the great interest in Wycliffe’s writings which Hus showed at this period that we find among his earliest works a Bohemian translation of the Trialogus of the English divine.

It was also this interest in the works of Wycliffe which was the cause, or perhaps the pretext, of the first theological controversy in which Hus became involved. It was, however, as yet only the university and particularly its German magisters, not the Church of Rome, that attacked him. A German master of theology, John Hübner, in 1403 brought to the notice of the chapter of Prague—the archbishopric was