Page:The life & times of Master John Hus by Count Lützow.djvu/41

 greatly underrated the learning of Hus. The comparison between an enthusiast such as was Hus, impelled by fiery indignation to denounce the iniquities of the clergy of Bohemia and the oppression of his countrymen, and a learned, though somewhat arid scholar such as was Wycliffe, is indeed altogether meaningless. Hus believed that a thorough reform of the alien, immoral, and simoniac clergy of Bohemia was necessary; and there being no hope of obtaining the assent to such a reform from the corrupt popes of his time, he inevitably and, it may be added, reluctantly became an opponent of the Church of Rome. In the controversy which followed, Hus used as weapons many of the writings of divines anterior to his time. Among these writings the works of Wycliffe, often themselves founded on earlier theologians, occur very frequently. Often also Hus and Wycliffe have drawn from the same source. It is a great merit of Mr. Workman that he pointed out, in the introduction to his edition of the Letters of Hus, that the Bohemian reformer is indebted to Gratian’s Decretum almost as greatly as to the writings of Wycliffe. Both Hus and Wycliffe also depend largely on the teaching of St. Augustine, and one of the principal theories of both church-reformers, which describes the church as the community of all who believe in Christ, laymen as well as priests, is derived from the Defensor Pacis of Marsiglio of Padua.

It may be stated generally that the extreme importance of verbal exactitude in scholastic definitions—where even the slightest deviation from the accepted wording might have exposed the writer to the suspicion of heresy—rendered it customary among the theologians of the Middle Ages to copy word by word the statements of previous writers. It was equally customary with the theologians of that time to incor-