Page:The life & times of Master John Hus by Count Lützow.djvu/36

 who were supported by Rome or the Bohemian court succeeded in obtaining benefices.

Of the Bohemian clergy as constituted in accordance with this new system it is impossible to speak otherwise than in terms of the severest reprobation. It was a general complaint that the priests neglected the duties of their office; many, indeed, entirely absented themselves, though they continued to draw the revenues of their benefices. Almost all the priests were accused of avarice and simony—an offence that had become so general that Hus devoted to it one of his best-known treatises. The pious Ernest of Pardubice, first Archbishop of Prague, was obliged to complain in one of his provincial statutes that many priests refused to celebrate burial and marriage services, to hear confessions, to administer the sacraments of communion and extreme unction, and indeed to perform any ecclesiastical functions except on payment of money. The regulations certainly forbade such payments, and declared that the penalty was to be deprivation of the benefice should the priest himself commit the offence, or imprisonment if the culprit was the vicar, or any other person acting for the priest. The enactments of the pious archbishop unfortunately proved ineffectual, and the abuses mentioned above continued and even increased up to the time of Hus. Ineffectual also were the repeated enactments which forbade priests to frequent taverns, to hunt, to wear laymen’s clothes, and to carry arms. The gravest and most serious grievance, however, and the one to which Hus and his forerunners constantly refer, was the appalling immorality of the clergy. The Latin reports on the archdeaconal inspection held in Prague, in 1379 and 1380, present a most repulsive picture. It is stated that of the thirty-two parish priests of Prague sixteen were notorious because of their, evil life, and much evidence of a most shocking character was produced by other priests and by inhabitants of the streets adjoining the parsonages. This inspection did not include the higher