Page:The life & times of Master John Hus by Count Lützow.djvu/112

 involved in the whirlpool of the politics of his time, the early writings of the Bohemian church-reformer should be briefly noticed. They are more numerous than was formerly believed. Earlier writers generally surmised that all, or almost all, his works had been written during the last six troublous years of his life (1409–1415). It is true that far fewer writings of Hus were then known than is the case at present. Yet it is nevertheless a physical impossibility that Hus should, during those troubled years of exile and imprisonment, have written all the numerous Bohemian and Latin works with which we are now acquainted. The bibliography of the works of Hus is still incomplete, though the masterly work of Dr. Flajshans, entitled Literarni Cinnost Mistra Jana Husi (The Literary Activity of Master John Hus), has thrown a vast amount of light on a formerly very obscure subject. Even now almost unknown manuscripts of Hus that were secreted in little-known libraries continue to be re-discovered and published.

Very early Bohemian writings of Hus, perhaps his earliest, are some sermons that have been recently discovered. Of these some had been partially known previously, as Hus had, as was his custom, incorporated them, though in a modified form, in other works, particularly in his Postilla. The discovery is due to that indefatigable scholar, Mr. Adolphus Patera, formerly librarian of the Bohemian museum at Prague. Mr. Patera found these manuscripts in the library of the Cistercian monastery at Wilhering in Upper Austria, and published them in the Journal of the Bohemian Society of Sciences. Hus, or rather the copier, here still uses the ancient system of writing Bohemian which, as will be mentioned later, was so greatly ameliorated and altered by Hus himself. He here also still intersperses his sentences with Latin words, a proceeding of which Hus strongly disapproved when he began to devote his attention to the language of his country. On the other hand, we here already find Hus’s holy hatred of vice and immorality, and he here already propounds the theory