Page:The life & times of Master John Hus by Count Lützow.djvu/44

 such a pedantic enterprise would be worth the great amount of research which it would require. No two men were more entirely different in all respects than were Wycliffe and Hus. Here, if ever, the time-worn saying that comparisons are odious may be considered as true.

It has been necessary to refer here to the influence of Wycliffe on Hus, as some writers have endeavoured to prove that the Bohemian movement in favour of church-reform was an artificial one imported from foreign countries, and that there was in Bohemia, at the end of the fourteenth century, no genuine national feeling opposed to the Church of Rome.

The reign of Charles I. of Bohemia—better known as the Emperor Charles IV.—raised Bohemia to a previously unknown degree of prosperity. The necessary consequence had been that the inhabitants of Bohemia, and particularly the citizens of Prague, had adopted a luxurious manner of life that had been quite unknown to their ancestors. The clergy greatly favoured by the king had acquired great riches, and, as mentioned previously, immorality, simony, and avarice prevailed among its members. Charles, a truly pious and enlightened Christian, by no means the bigot described by some historians, was deeply distressed by the state of the Bohemian clergy; and with the aid of his trusted councillor, Ernest of Pardubice, Archbishop of Prague, he endeavoured to stem the current of immorality and to bring about the much-needed reformation of the Bohemian clergy. But the deaths of the archbishop, in 1364, and of Charles himself, in 1378, put a stop to their good work. Though the king had reached the age of sixty-two, there is little doubt that his life was shortened by the apprehension that the evil life of the priesthood would finally cause a revolution, and by the beginning of the schism which took place shortly before his death, and with which he rightly thought that his son, Venceslas, would be unable to cope.

The Bohemian movement in favour of church-reform became in its later and better known period so entirely a national one