Page:The life & times of Master John Hus by Count Lützow.djvu/234

 trines more profoundly than any cardinal from the first to the last. If pope and cardinals give their attention to worldly affairs, if they scandalise the faithful by their ambition and avarice, then are they successors not of Christ, not of Peter, not of the apostles, but of Satan, of Antichrist Judas Iscariot. It is not certain that the pope is really the head of the church; he cannot even be sure that he is not a prescitus, and therefore no member of the true church at all. St. Peter erred even after he had been called by Christ. Pope Leo was a heretic and Pope Gregory (XII.) was but recently condemned by the Council of Pisa. It is a popular fallacy to imagine that a pope is necessary to rule the church. We must be thankful to God that He gave us His only son to rule over the church, and He would be able to direct it, even if there were no temporal pope, or if a woman occupied the papal throne. As with the pope and the cardinals, so with the prelates and the clergy generally. There is a double clergy, that of Christ, and that of Antichrist. The former live according to the law of God, the latter seek only worldly advantage, [sic] Not every priest is a saint, but every saint is a priest. Faithful Christians are, therefore, great in the church of God, but worldly prelates are among its lowest members, and may indeed, should they be presciti, not be members of the church at all.

Of the other Latin works that belong to this period, in which—as already mentioned—Hus’s literary activity was greatest, only a few can be mentioned. Foremost among them, mainly because of its great historical interest, is Hus’s Appeal from the Pope to Jesus Christ, to which I have already referred. To the haughty and worldly clergy of the time it appeared both absurd and insolent, and every mention of