Page:The life & times of Master John Hus by Count Lützow.djvu/322

 therefore arose whether a revision of the judgment on Hus, such as took place in the case of Joan of Arc, would not be possible. Professor Kalousek of the Bohemian University of Prague, one of the most distinguished historians of Bohemia, as long ago as in 1869, addressed a pseudonymous letter to one of the newspapers of Prague suggesting such a revision. The matter at the time attracted considerable attention, and several distinguished Roman Catholic priests published replies to the letter. In a lengthy and very fair work on the teaching of Hus, Dr. Anton Lenz, one of the most eminent Bohemian divines, though doing full justice to the moral qualities, the integrity, and piety of Hus, yet maintains that he was a heretic, and that the council was justified in declaring him to be one. It cannot, however, be denied that among the heretical views which Dr. Lenz in his able book attributed to Hus, some refer to matters which the Roman Church had not at that time declared to be dogmas. Another Bohemian priest, Dr. Francis Sulc, has published a Latin and Bohemian version of the famed thirty articles against Hus, and has printed with each article the recognised teaching of the Roman Church on the subject in question. To one who has no pretence to write as a theologian it certainly appears that on certain questions, that of predestination in particular, Hus's teaching did differ from that of the Roman Church, even in the development which it had reached in the fifteenth century. The question is, however, a very difficult one, and Professor Kalousek has in a recent lecture truly stated that much further study of the life and the works of Hus is required. Even quite recently valuable works of the Bohemian church-reformer that were hidden away in formerly inaccessible libraries have been made public. It is hardly necessary to add that, in view of the present current of opinion in the Roman church, a rehabilitation of Hus is now much more improbable than at the time mentioned above.