Alexander and of Cæsar, what are they all when weighed in the balance against this one glorious achievement? From the stake of Huss, what blessings have flowed, and are still flowing, to the world! From the moment he expired amid the flames, his name became a power, which will continue to speed on the great cause of truth and light, till the last shackle shall be rent from the intellect, and the conscience, emancipated from every usurpation, shall be free to obey the authority of its rightful Lord. What a surprise to his and the Gospel's enemies! "Huss is dead," say they, as they retire from the meadow where they have just seen him expire. Huss is dead.

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The Rhine has received his ashes, and is bearing them on its rushing floods to the ocean, there to bury them for ever. No: Huss is alive. It is not death, but life, that he has found in the fire; his stake has given him not an entombment, but a resurrection. The winds as they blow over Constance are wafting the spirit of the confessor and martyr to all the countries of Christendom. The nations are being stirred; Bohemia is awakening; a hundred years, and Germany and all Christendom will shake off their slumber; and then will come the great reckoning which the martyr's prophetic spirit foretold: "In the course of a hundred years you will answer to God and to me.”

BEFORE advancing to the history of Jerome, let us glance back on the two great men, representatives of their epoch, who have passed before us, and note the relations in which they stand to each other. These relations are such that the two always come up together. The century that divides them is annihilated. Everywhere in the history-in the hall of the University of Prague, in the pulpit of the Bethlehem Chapel, in the council chamber of Constance these two figures, Wicliffe and Huss, are seen standing side by side. Wicliffe is the master, and Huss the scholar. The latter receives his opinions from the former— not, however, without investigation and proof—and he incorporates them with himself, so to speak, at the cost of a severe mental struggle. "Both men," says Lechler, "place the Word of God at the foundation of their system, and acknowledge the Holy Scriptures as the supreme judge and authority. Still they differ in many respects. Wicliffe reached his principle gradually, and with laborious effort, whilst Huss accepted it, and had simply to hold it fast, and to establish it.' To Wicliffe the principle was an independent conquest, to Huss it came as a

1 Lechler, Johann von Wiclif, vol. ii., p. 266.

possession which another had won. The opinions of Wicliffe on the head of the sole authority of Scripture were sharply defined, and even received great prominence, while Huss never so clearly defined his sentiments nor gave them the same large place in his teaching. Wicliffe, moreover, repudiated the limitary idea that Scripture was to be interpreted according to the unanimous consent of the Fathers, and held that the Spirit makes known the true sense of the Word of God, and that Scripture is to be interpreted by Scripture.

2 "The pious remembrance of John Huss," says Lechler, I was held sacred by the nation. The day of his death, 6th July, was incontestably considered from that time onward as the festival of a saint and martyr. It was called the day of remembrance' of the master John Huss, and even at the end of the sixteenth century the inhabitants of Prague laid such stress on the observances of the day, that the abbot of the monastery Emmaus, Paul Horsky, was threatened and persecuted in the worst manner because he had once allowed one to work in his vineyard on Huss's day, as if it were an ordinary workday." It was not uncommon to place pictures of Huss and Jerome on the altars of the parish churches of Bohemia and Moravia. (Lechler, Johann von Wiclif, vol. ii., p. 285.) Even at this day, as the author can testify from personal observation, there is no portrait more common in the windows of the print shops of Prague than that of John Huss.

Huss, on the other hand, was willing to receive the Scriptures as the Holy Ghost had given wisdom to the Fathers to explain them.

"Both Wicliffe and Huss held that the true Church lies in nothing else than the totality of the elect.' His whole conceptions and ideas of the Church, Huss has derived from no other than the great English Reformer. Wicliffe based the whole of his Church system upon the eternal purposes of God respecting the elect, building up from the foundations, and making his whole plan sublimely accordant with the nature of God, the constitution of the universe, and the divine government of all things. Huss's conception of the Church lay more on the surface, and the relations between God and his people were with him those of a disciple to his teacher, or a servant to his master."

As regards the function of Christ as the one Mediator between God and man, Huss was at one with Wicliffe. The English Reformer carried out his doctrine, with the strength and joy of a full conviction, to its logical issue, in the entire repudiation of the veneration and intercession of the saints. Huss, on the other hand, grasping the glorious truth of Christ's sole mediatorship more feebly, was never able to shake himself wholly free from a dependence on the intercession and good offices of the glorified.

Nor were the views of Huss on the doctrine of the Sacraments nearly so well defined or so accord ant with Scripture as those of Wicliffe; and, as has been already said, he believed in transubstantiation to the end. On the question of the Pope's authority he more nearly approximated Wicliffe's views; Huss denied the divine right of the Bishop of Rome to the primacy of the Church, and wished to restore the original equality which he held existed among the bishops of the Church. Wicliffe would have gone farther; equality among the priests and not merely among the bishops would alone have contented him.

Lechler has drawn with discriminating hand a contrast between these two men. The power of their intellect, the graces of their character, and the achievements of their lives are finely and sharply brought out in the contrasted lights of the following comparison:

"Huss is indeed not a primitive, creative, original genius like Wicliffe, and as a thinker neither speculatively inclined nor of systematic talent. In the sphere of theological thinking Wicliffe is a kingly spirit, of an inborn power of mind, and through unwearied mental labour gained the position of a leader of thought; whilst Huss appears as a star of the second magnitude, and planet-like

revolves around Wicliffe as his sun. Both indeed circle round the great central Sun, which is Christ himself. Farther, Huss is not a character like Wicliffe, twice tempered and sharp as steel-an inwardly strong nature, going absolutely straight forward, without looking on either side, following only his conviction, and carrying it out logically and energetically to its ultimate consequences, sometimes even with a ruggedness and harshness which wounds and repulses. In comparison with Wicliffe, Huss is a somewhat soft personality, finely strung, more receptively and passively inclined than with a vocation for independent power and heroic conquest. Nevertheless, it is not to be inferred that he was a weakling, a characterless, yielding personality. With softness and tenderness of soul it is quite possible to combine a moral toughness, an immutable faith, an unbending firmness, forming a union of qualities which exerts an attractive and winning influence, nay, challenges the highest esteem and veneration.

"Added to this is the moral purity and unsel fishness of the man who exercised an almost ascetic severity towards himself; his sincere fear of God, tender conscientiousness, and heart-felt piety, whereby he cared nothing for himself or his own honour, but before all put the honour of God and his Saviour, and next to that the honour of his fatherland, and the unblemished reputation for orthodox piety of his countrymen. In honest zeal for the cause of God and Jesus Christ, both men— Wicliffe and Huss--stand on the same footing. Only in Wicliffe's case the zeal was of a more fiery, manly, energetic kind, whilst in Huss it burned with a warm, silent glow, in union with almost feminine tenderness, and fervent faith and endurance. And this heart, with all its gentleness, unappalled by even the most terrible death, this unconquerable, this all-overcoming patience of the man in his confession of evangelical truth, won for him the affections of his cotemporaries, and made the most lasting impression upon his own times and on succeeding generations. If Wicliffe was surpassingly a man of understanding, Huss was surpassingly a man of feeling; not of a genial disposition like Luther, but rather of a deep, earnest, gentle nature. Farther, if Wicliffe was endowed with a powerful, resolute, manly, energetic will, Huss was gifted with a true, earnest, enduring will. I might say Wicliffe was a man of God, Huss was a child of God; both, however, were heroes in God's host, each according to the gifts which the Spirit of God had lent them, and in each these gifts of mind were used for the good of the whole body. Measured by an intellectual standard, Huss was certainly not

WE have pursued our narrative uninterruptedly to the close of Huss's life. We must now retrace our steps a little way, and narrate the fate of his disciple and fellow-labourer, Jerome. These two had received the same baptism of faith, and were to drink of the same cup of martyrdom. When Jerome heard of the arrest of Huss, he flew to Constance in the hope of being able to succour, in some way, his beloved master. When he saw that without doing anything for Huss he had brought his own life into peril, he attempted to flee. He was already far on his way back to Prague when he was arrested, and brought to Constance, which he entered in a cart, loaded with chains and guarded by soldiers, as if he had been a malefactor.1

On May 23rd, 1415, he appeared before the Council. The Fathers were thrown into tumult and uproar as on the occasion of Huss's first appearance before them. Jerome's assailants were chiefly the doctors, and especially the famous Gerson, with whom he had chanced to dispute in Paris and Heidelberg, when attending the univer sities of these cities. At night he was conducted to

1 Bonnechose, Reformers before the Reformation, vol. i., p. 232.

"He went to England probably about 1396, studied some years in Oxford, and brought back copies of several of Wicliffe's theological books, which he copied there. We know this from his own testimony before the Council of Constance, on April 27th, 1416. In the course of the trial he answered, among other things, to the accusation that he had published in Bohemia and elsewhere false doctrines from Wicliffe's books: 'I confess that in my youth I went out of a desire for learning to England, and because I heard of Wicliffe as a man of profound and extraordinary intellect, copied and brought with me to Prague his Dialogue and Trialogue, the MSS. of which I could obtain.' Jerome was certainly not the first Bohemian student who went from Prague to Oxford." (Lechler, Johann von Wiclif, vol. ii., p. 112.)

the dungeon of a tower in the cemetery of St. Paul. His chains, riveted to a lofty beam, did not permit of his sitting down; and his arms, crossed behind on his neck and tied with fetters, bent his head downward and occasioned him great suffering. He fell ill, and his enemies, fearing that death would snatch him from them, relaxed somewhat the rigour of his treatment; nevertheless in that dreadful prison he remained an entire year.'

Meanwhile a letter was received from the barons of Bohemia, which convinced the Council that it had deceived itself when it fancied it had done with Huss when it threw his ashes into the Rhine. A storm was evidently brewing, and should the Fathers plant a second stake, the tempest would be all the more sure to burst, and with the more awful fury. Instead of burning Jerome, it were better to induce him to recant. To this they now directed all their efforts, and so far they were successful. They brought him before them, and summarily offered him the alternative of retractation or death by fire. Ill in body and depressed in mind from his confinement of four months in a noisome dungeon, cut off from his friends, the most of whom had left Constance when Huss was burned, Jerome yielded to the solicitation of the Council. He shrank from the bitter stake and clung to life.

But his retractation (September 23rd, 1415) was a very qualified one. He submitted himself to the Council, and subscribed to the justice of its condem.

3 Lechler, Johann von Wiclif, vol. ii., pp. 269, 270.

4 These particulars are related by Von der Hardt, tom. iv., p. 218; and quoted by Bonnechose, Reformers before the Reformation, vol. i., pp. 236, 237. The Roman writer Cochlæus also admits the severity of Jerome's imprisonment.