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To a number of people God gave special foresight of the coming reformation of the sixteenth century, in which the universal spiritual supremacy of the Papacy ended. A few of the many examples will be profitable. Says D'Aubigne: "John Huss preached in Bohemia a century before Luther preached in Saxony. He seems to have penetrated deeper than his predecessors into the essence of Christian truth.
Hoch placid and content, Gretchen weeping over her hard fate. Enter old Huss's head bookkeeper. Huss says fiercely, "I gave you three weeks to find out why your books don't balance, and to prove that you are not a defaulter; the time is up find me the missing property or you go to prison as a thief." "Where?" Gretchen: "Saved!"
Within these seven or eight months Sigismund and the reforming party, thanks to the division of the council into nations, seemed to have gained a signal success. Sigismund had purchased his triumph by breaking his pledge to Huss, and for this he was to pay a heavy penalty in the subsequent disturbances in Bohemia.
His pathway, indeed, is gradually becoming more narrow, as well as more rough he is one of those who must often walk alone. Indulgences were now attacked by him in public disputations. About this period some of his friends were condemned to death because they objected to indulgences, and Huss took up their cause. He hastened to the Senate House, and pleaded for the three condemned men.
It abounded in emotion, and was to use the impossible word Keats coined "yearnful." Huss should write more of this sort of music. We need its rare spontaneity and truth, as we do not need the all too frequent mathematics of those who compose, as Tybalt fought, "by the book."
It is, however, in the much more important movement, which originated with Wyclif and extended to Central Europe through Huss, that we must look for the more obvious influences determining the course of religious development in Germany. The Wyclifite movement in England was less a doctrinal heterodoxy than a revolt against the Papacy and the priestly hierarchy.
Huss was treated in what would seem to us a very harsh way; but from the standpoint of the council he was given every advantage. By special favor he was granted a public hearing. The council was anxious that Huss should retract; but no form of retraction could be arranged to which he would agree.
The Moravian brethren, though dating in the first instance from the time of Huss, owed their resuscitation to that wave of mystic pietism which passed through Germany in the seventeenth century, showing its early power in the writings of Behmen, and reaching its full tide in the new vigour of spiritual life inspired into the Lutheran Church by the activity of Arndt and Spener.
It was the way they had ended with Huss, with Jerome, the century before. A short argument, fire.
At present there is much intellectual activity among the Servians in various departments of literature, tragedy, comedy, satire, and fiction, but the names of the writers are new to Europeans, and not easily remembered. John Huss, Jerome of Prague, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Comenius, and others. The Bohemian is one of the principal Slavic languages.
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