Page:The life & times of Master John Hus by Count Lützow.djvu/153

 Venceslas did his best to maintain order in his capital. He severely prohibited rioting in the streets and the singing of abusive songs. He also, with great fairness, requested the archbishop to indemnify those whose books had been seized and burnt. As a protest against the destruction of the writings of Wycliffe, Hus and his adherents, according to the academic customs of the time, held a great disputation in the large hall of the Carolinum college. The disputation, in which various speakers were to defend works of Wycliffe, began on July 27. Hus himself on that day spoke in defence of Wycliffe’s book, De Trinitate. Hus’s treatise, De Libris Haereticorum Legendis, written about this time, covers almost exactly the same ground, and we find in it the contents of Hus’s speech. Hus in it strongly blamed the burning of Wycliffe’s writings. These works at any rate contained much that was good, and their destruction had brought discord and trouble into the country. Even should these books have contained heretical opinions, they should not have been burnt. Otherwise might they have burnt also the work of Peter Lombard—to whom, as we know, Hus owed so much—or those of Aristotle. If, he continued, the doctors said that none should inquire but all should submit—a theory that has a strangely modern aspect—then they were worse than Jews and Pharisees. Christ conversed with the heretical Sadducees. Hus ended by declaring that he would not submit to the prohibition of preaching and that he would undauntedly face all dangers which might result from such a course. On the following days,