Page:The life & times of Master John Hus by Count Lützow.djvu/93

 the highest rank had his life been longer and less troubled. In his early university days Hus was not only a firm adherent of the Catholic Church—he indeed always continued to consider himself as such—but he even followed superstitious practices of the Roman Church which he afterwards condemned. When, in 1393, a year of jubilee was announced at Prague, and letters of indulgence remitting sins were publicly sold at the Vysehrad, Hus was among those who availed themselves of this privilege and, as he himself tells us, spent his few remaining coins in purchasing these supposed celestial favours. Other men, however, who were older than Hus at this period, already viewed with great displeasure this traffic in holy things, and when, in 1412, indulgences were again sold at Prague to defray the expenses of the war which Pope John XXIII. was waging against the King of Naples, many were mindful of the scandals caused by the sale of indulgences in 1393.

The University of Prague was at that time at the height of its fame, and Hus had the privilege of hearing the sermons and lectures of many eminent men. Among them was Adalbert Ranco, who has already been mentioned, and whose strongly anti-papal views may not have been without influence on the young student. One of Hus’s teachers also was the famed preacher, John of Stekna, whose sermons in the Bethlehem chapel induced Hus to seek indulgences at the Vysehrad, and whom he, referring to his eloquence, compares to a “sonorous trumpet.” We have on the whole but scanty information concerning Hus during his stay at the college in the fruit-market. Among his fellow-students were some men with whom he was again associated later in life. Such men were Jerome of Prague, a man somewhat younger than Hus, and Jacob of Stribro, commonly known as Jacobellus, because of his diminutive size, who was the real originator of utraquism. The fates were to be more gracious to Jacobellus