Page:The life & times of Master John Hus by Count Lützow.djvu/231

 all those of his works that are important, or characteristic of the writer. I cannot, therefore, omit the strange little book entitled, Writings against the Priest-Kitchenmaster. The work, written, as the title indicates, in a popular manner, met with great favour, and has been mentioned oftener than it deserves. Written in 1414, it was first printed in 1509, at an earlier period than almost any other work of Hus. It certainly gives evidence of the occasional smallness of a great mind. It appears that Hus, during his exile, perhaps while a guest at the castle of one of the Bohemian nobles, met a “priest-kitchenmaster” (or steward of the kitchen), who is otherwise unknown to us. The man, who had given up his ecclesiastical rank to take a situation in a kitchen, affronted Hus, stating that “he was worse than any devil.” Hus bore down on the unfortunate cook with all the weight of his scholastic skill. He advances fifteen arguments to prove that he was not worse than the devil, one of them being that the devil had sinned for 6005 years, while he (Hus) had not sinned for fifty years, not having as yet attained that age. Incidentally—and this is the only real interest of the book—Hus shows how largely the priests then occupied secular offices. “The priests,” he writes, “now strive to obtain a hold on all worldly offices, where they smell money. We find priests as burgraves, priests at the register offices, priests as judges, priests as estate-agents, priests as cooks, priests as writers, and if the beadle’s work were not so hard and so ill-paid, we would find priests as beadles also.” Hus then somewhat uncharitably reminds his adversary of the proverb that there is no shorter walk than that from the kitchen to the beer-cellar.

Of the Latin writings of Hus that belong to this period, the most important is the treatise De Ecclesia. It was the principal cause or rather pretext of his condemnation at Constance. The book is an abridgment of the work of Wycliffe