Page:The life & times of Master John Hus by Count Lützow.djvu/305

 in Constance in consequence of the presence of so many ecclesiastics. Such matters have often been overlooked by writers of all parties. Yet they deserve attention. It was the burning indignation kindled in the minds of clean-living and respectable men by such scandals that produced the movement in favour of church-reform far more than any differences of opinion on matters of dogma. In this letter (June 26), which need not be translated entirely, : “It has occurred to me to inform you how the council, haughty, avaricious and full of all iniquity, has condemned my Bohemian books, which it had neither heard nor seen, nor, had it heard them, would have understood; for there were at the council Italians, Frenchmen, Englishmen, Spaniards and Germans, and men of other nations. The only ones who would have understood them were John, Bishop of Litomysl and the other Bohemian instigators, with the chapters of Prague and the Vysehrad, who originated the insults to God’s truth and to our Bohemian home, which (country) I, trusting in God, hold to be the most pious land, zealous for the divine word and for morality. Oh, had you but seen this council, which calls itself the most holy council and claims infallibility! you would have beheld great abomination, of which I have heard the Suabians say, that in thirty years their city Constance or Kostnice will not be purged of the sins which the council committed in their town; some say that the council has scandalised all; others spat out when they beheld the foul deeds.”

On the following day—June 27—Hus sent a letter of farewell to the University of Prague with which he had been so losely connected during his studies and during his prolonged truggle against the enemies of church-reform. In this letter, written in Latin according to the custom of the learned of that S