CH. III.] PARTIALITY OF THE COUNCIL. 111 This treatise, which the emperor met with in Paris a few months after the subject had been brought before the council, was subsequently condemned to be burned, as erroneous in faith and morals, seditious, cruel, scandalous, injurious, impious, offensive to pi ous ears, and heretical. But no sentence was passed upon it in public session. The order exerted their influence with Martin V., just then elected pope, (1418,) and he dared not offend so powerful a body. In vain did the French and Polish deputations, who felt that their cause was one and the same, urge the matter. Neither Falkenberg's book, nor Petit's apology, odious as they both were, could be brought to share the fate to which the works of Huss had been doomed. Falkenberg himself was imprisoned, but to leave the matter there seemed to Gerson a mockery of all justice. His deliberate view of the matter, as he saw it in retrospect, is expressed in his works.1 The course of the council, so he remarks, "gives the Bohemians just occasion to accuse it of a most criminal partiality, in treating with indifference a matter so vital to Christian morals and civil society, while other heresies less fatal are dealt with so harshly. It opens the gate to robbery, perjury, massacre, and assassination. It takes from bishops the power of repressing heretics, or correcting those who err within their diocese; for if they see that the council had no such authority, they will not dare to undertake its exercise. Secular princes will find themselves under the necessity of using temporal 1 Ger. Op. tom. v. 1014. weapons against such as teach pestilent doctrine in their states. Thus the authority of the council is made cheap; its deeds are null and void; it becomes a laughing-stock for infidels, schismatics, especially for Peter de Luna (Benedict XIII.) and his adherents, who will not fail to exult at the result of a measure so exciting in expectations, so futile in its issue." It is more than possible that motives of a more personal and worldly nature than Gerson was aware of, found a place in his heart. His zeal was quickened, perhaps, by a sense of what he considered indignities offered to himself. He had boldly stemmed the tide of popular opinion, when the power of the Duke of Burgundy was at its height in Paris. His name had been mingled with the curses of the popu lace. His house had been sacked, and his life endangered by a lawless mob.1 He doubtless felt himself to have been a persecuted man. Nor had his treatment in the council been such as he might deem justly due to his position and his ability. He found, to his sorrow and disappointment, that human nature was much the same at Constance and at the French capital. The scenes of the council were such, that to take a part in them must at times have wounded his own self-respect. They were anything but models of decorum and order. Shouting, stamping, recrimination, and almost every form of confusion, were not infrequent. In Von Falkenberg he found another John Petit, and the cause each defended was much the same. Nay, the former had even volunteered, incited, doubtless, by the bribes of the Duke of Bur 'Sketch of Gerson's Life in Van der Hardt. Сн. III.] TREATMENT OF GERSON. 113 gundy, and to secure his alliance, to become the avowed champion of Petit. In this character he assaulted D'Ailly and Gerson in no measured terms. His pamphlets teem with insults, full of abuse and contemptuous insolence. He speaks of Gerson as so unversed in logic that he should be sent to school to learn its rules. Not the glory of the University of Paris, but the disgrace of its ignorance, is manifest in the stupidity of its chancellor. No wonder, he says, if such a man as he, unacquainted with the rudiments of logic, occupied that post, the Bishop of Paris, with the doctors of his council of faith, should have blundered into the error of condemning the propositions of Petit. It is not strange that Gerson's zeal was inflamed by some sense of the personal outrage to which he was subjected. The consciousness of his own integrity perhaps needed this new spur to rouse him to the most strenuous effort. And that effort was put forth. The great man, with his noble heart and gigantic intellect, toiled on, hoping against hope, and trusting with the fondness of affection to the action. of a council that was forever humbling his idolatrous respect for it by showing itself but a prostrate Dagon. Efforts that would have crushed others in weeks, were by him continued without intermission for years. It was with feelings that none can envy, that he at last withdrew from a scene that, at once, had witnessed his glory and humiliation. The dreams of early years were dashed to the earth. His enemy, the Duke of Burgundy, was triumphant. The council, which he had at first idolized, dared not touch the powerful criminal. The University of Paris was no longer his home. The murderer of the Duke of Orleans ruled there still; and the broken-hearted exile found the only repose-the only real peace he was again to enjoy on earth-in the humble monastery of a distant city. There, at Lyons, we see that intellect, which found not its peer in the assembled representatives of the Christian world, engaged in the instruction of little children, and teaching themin a humility which had been taught by adversityas they should pass the spot where his ashes would soon rest, to "pray for poor John Gerson!" CHAPTER IV. THE COUNCIL AND THE BOHEMIANS.-JEROME RECANTS. IMPRESSIONS MADE BY THE EXECUTION OF HUSS. PASQUINADE. SERMON OF THE - HIS SPEECH, EXPLANATORY AND INTRODUCTORY. AUG. 1, 1415-SEPT. 23, 1415. THE execution of Huss, as the intelligence of it went abroad, was variously received. To some it afforded occasion for exultation; in the minds of others it excited only grief and indignation. The enemies of the reformer gained nothing by it. The council had only aggravated its own infamy by the cruel deed. Sigismund had forever alienated from himself the sympathies of the Bohemians, by the complacency with which he had tolerated the violation of his safe-conduct. The instigators of the prosecution had covered their own memory with an odium which would follow them to their graves. |