Page:The life & times of Master John Hus by Count Lützow.djvu/403

 form by the council and constituted the famed compacts, which continued to be, up to 1567, a fundamental law of the kingdom. The compacts declared that:—

I. The Holy Sacrament is to be given freely in both kinds to all Christians in Bohemia and Moravia and to those elsewhere who adhere to the faith of the two countries.

II. All mortal sins shall be punished and extirpated by those whose office it is to do so.

III. The word of God is to be freely and truthfully preached by the priests of the Lord and by worthy deacons.

IV. The priests in the time of the law of grace shall claim ownership of no worldly possessions.

The compacts are obviously founded on the articles of Prague, but they hardly satisfied the demands of even the most moderate utraquists. Some of the stipulations are very unclear. The one which limited the wealth of the clergy, always very reluctantly accepted by the church, was liable to be interpreted in various manners. Indirectly this question contributed considerably to the outbreak of the thirty years war. It is doubtful whether the compacts would have generally been accepted by the Bohemians had it not been that a political reaction took place in the country about this time. The formerly powerful nobility of Bohemia had played but an insignificant part in the latter years of the Hussite wars. Many utraquist nobles therefore wished—if the freedom to retain the revered chalice was granted them—to act in union with the papal nobles and suppress the turbulent democracy of Tabor. Almost the entire nobility of Bohemia, both utraquist and Romanist, and a few of the more conservative towns formed a confederacy for this purpose, and their army decisively defeated the Taborite forces, led by Prokop the Great, at Lipany on May 30, 1434. A general pacification rapidly followed the defeat of the advanced party. At a meeting at