Page:The life & times of Master John Hus by Count Lützow.djvu/235

 the document was at Constance received with jeers and derision. With the articles derived from Wycliffe’s works, which Hus was, rightly or wrongly, stated to have accepted in their entirety, and the ludicrously untrue and wicked statement that Hus had declared that he was one of the persons of the divinity, the appeal was the document by which the council was mostly influenced when it pronounced sentence on Hus. This is a striking proof of the unacknowledged and perhaps unconscious scepticism which prevailed among the rich prelates whose influence directed the deliberations at Constance. Hus’s profound piety is evident in every line of his appeal. He confidently appeals to “the omnipotent God, the first and last refuge of the oppressed, the Lord who will preserve the truth in all eternity.” Hus then quotes the examples of Christ himself, St. Chrysostomus, Bishops Andrew of Prague and Robert of Lincoln as precedents for his direct appeal to God. He then begs all faithful in Christ, particularly the princes, barons, knights, citizens, and all other inhabitants of the Bohemian kingdom, to pity him, who had been unjustly struck down by excommunication on the instigation of his enemy, Michael de causis. Pope John XXIII. had decreed this punishment without even granting a hearing to Hus’s representatives, a favour which should not even be refused to Jew, pagan, or heretic. Hus ends by again appealing to the “Lord Jesus Christ, the justest judge, who knows, protects, and rewards all men whose cause is just.” Though one of Hus’s shortest works, the Appeal is, because of its historical interest, one of the best known. We therefore possess very numerous manuscripts of the treatise, and it has been fre-