Page:The life & times of Master John Hus by Count Lützow.djvu/207

 again find among them the wearisome falsehood that Hus had said that the sacraments were invalid when administered by an unworthy priest. These bitter letters, written some time before the meeting of the Council of Constance, render Gerson’s intransigent attitude at that assembly less surprising. The voice of Gerson did not remain isolated. Thus Simon, Cardinal of Rheims, addressed a letter to Archbishop Conrad in which he also begged him to extirpate heresy in his diocese. The evil fame of Bohemia as a country where heretics dwelt now began to spread, and was indeed scarcely extinct among the uneducated in Austria before the beginning of the nineteenth century. We find an early proof of this animosity when we read that Bohemian students were attacked as being “heretics” at the then newly-founded University of Vienna. A letter of Magister Michael Malenic, rector of the University of Prague, in which he complains to the authorities of the Vienna University of the ill-treatment of Bohemian scholars, has been preserved.

The movements of Hus are at this period very uncertain, but there is little doubt that he paid another short visit to Prague in April 1414. He appears not to have stayed there long. The letters of Gerson, who as chancellor of the famed University of Paris and friend of the French royal family was greatly esteemed, made Hus’s position in Prague even more difficult than it had been before, and they may also have impressed for a time King Venceslas. He was at heart always a friend of Hus, but greatly feared his treacherous younger brother Sigismund, through whose intrigues he had at the beginning of his reign twice been imprisoned by his own subjects. Utterly faithless and unscrupulous as was Sigismund, he was as ready to employ the accusation of heresy as any other for the purpose of injuring his brother. Hus, in whose character his deep gratitude for the often unstable support of his king must be noted as a somewhat touching