Page:The life & times of Master John Hus by Count Lützow.djvu/397

 them a chapter which is neither edifying nor trustworthy. The gifted author of Lucretia and Euryalus seems to have carefully preserved all tales concerning this matter that were current at the time.

Though the Taborites were innocent of the worst accusations brought against them by their opponents, it cannot be denied that the more fanatical members of that party greatly injured the cause of church-reform. Proclaiming as they did the approach of the millennium, and denouncing as the imagining of Antichrist all secular and ecclesiastical authority, they undoubtedly encouraged communism and anarchy in Bohemia. This alone accounts for the bitterness with which the Calixtines, and magister John of Pribram in particular, write of the Taborites. This bitterness is particularly evident in Pribram’s famed work entitled The Life of the Taborite priests. He has in consequence been attacked by modern Bohemian writers, who have even asserted that he became unfaithful to the Calixtine cause. This is certainly untrue. Like Hus himself, Pribram did not wish the nation to separate entirely from the universal church, but he hoped to establish in Bohemia an autonomous national church which would pre-