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Updated: May 4, 2025
The Hussites who broke from her were to him 'sinful heretics. Nay, at that time he used the very argument by which afterwards the Romish Church thought to crush the principles and claims of the Reformation, namely, that if we deny that power of the Church and Papacy, any man may equally say that he is filled with the Holy Ghost; everyone will claim to be his own master, and there will be as many Churches as heads.
We have, moreover, to remember the Cathari, the Paterini, the Fraticelli, the Albigenses, the Hussites heretics in whom the new light dimly shone, but who were instantly exterminated by the Church.
The sect which owed its rise to John Huss, still existed in that country; it agreed with the Romish Church in ceremonies and doctrines, with the single exception of the administration of the Communion, in which the Hussites communicated in both kinds.
The French Picards, at a much later date, insisted on public nakedness, believing that God had sent their leader into the world as a new Adam to reestablish the law of Nature; they were persecuted and were finally exterminated by the Hussites. In daily life, however, a considerable degree of nakedness was tolerated during mediæval times.
The reign of cruelty continued, each side treating its prisoners barbarously. The Imperialists branded theirs with a cup, the Hussites theirs with a cross, on their foreheads. The citizens of Breslau joined those of Prague, and emulated them by flinging their councillors out of the town-house windows. In return the German miners of Kuttenberg threw sixteen hundred Hussites down the mines.
The bloody persecutions of the Waldensians in France, which almost resulted in the extirpation of these peaceful mountain people, of the followers of Wyclif in England, whose remains Rome had exhumed after his death and burned, of the Hussites in Bohemia, were all aimed at translations of the Bible into the languages which the common people understood.
On this basis a reformation would be easy; but it would be analogous to that of the Hussites and Anabaptists in Europe, rather than of the true Church reformation which succeeded these, and would hardly be universal or permanent.
It was besieged by the Hussites in 1422, and parts of it were burnt down and allowed to go to ruin. Over a century later it was restored, but suffered eclipse after the Thirty Years' War, was even in pawn for several years, and did not quite retrieve its fallen fortunes until after the coup d'etat of 1918.
But half Prague's troubles, one imagines, might have been saved to it, had it possessed windows less large and temptingly convenient. The first of these mighty catastrophes it set rolling by throwing the seven Catholic councillors from the windows of its Rathhaus on to the pikes of the Hussites below.
Luther was now classed as an open ally of the Hussites, whose very ground of contention was the cup. Duke George in alarm complained of him to the Elector Frederick. It was rumoured about him even that he had been born and educated among the Bohemians. To this episcopal note, which he ridiculed in a pun, Luther published a short and pungent reply in Latin and German.
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