Page:The life & times of Master John Hus by Count Lützow.djvu/200

 The priests would thus be able to discharge more freely their sacerdotal duties and live according to the rules of the gospel; the laity also would in consequence fulfil more worthily its duties according to the decrees of Scripture. All customs obviously contrary to Christ’s law which had been introduced among the Christian people should be extirpated everywhere—from the king downward to the meanest layman. With regard to Hus, the statement demanded that he should be confronted with his adversaries. Should it, after this confrontation, appear to be impossible to obtain both spiritual unity and worldly advantage, let at least peace and concord according to Christ’s law be maintained in Bohemia, and all be ordered to conform to it. Then would evil report and the accusation of heresy not harm the kingdom of Bohemia. If unfounded evil report did not harm the Son of God, neither would it harm the Bohemian kingdom. The puritanic note of this spirited declaration is very striking. We meet here with ideas such as that of the duty of rulers to suppress open sin that played a large part in the Hussite movement. The controversy continued, and both parties replied to the accusations raised against them by their opponents. The friends of church-reform denied again that Hus and his friends were guilty of heresy. They maintained that the real cause of the complaints against them was the fact that they had strongly denounced the vices prevalent among the Bohemian clergy. The party opposed to church-reform found a very energetic champion in John the iron, bishop of Litomysl, afterwards of Olomouc. He addressed to the new Archbishop Conrad a letter couched in very strong language, but which contained nothing that had not been previously stated. The bishop made no allusion to church-reform, but maintained that the pope alone could and should decide on all contentious questions of doctrine, and insisted on the blind obedience to their hierarchical superiors which was the duty of all priests. Hus was denounced in violent terms as one