CHAPTER XI. MEASURES OF THE POPE AND COUNCIL AGAINST THE BOHEMIANS. 3TATE OF BOHEMIA. - ALARM OF THE CLERGY WHO ADHERED TO THE COUNCIL. — DISORDER. FLIGHT OF WENZEL. APPREHENSIONS OF THE COUNCIL. GERSON'S TREATISE ON THE EUCHARIST. MAURICE OF PRAGUE. SIGISMUND'S LETTER TO LAUNA. — THREATENS A CRUSADE. HIS LETTERS TO HIS BROTHER, WENZEL. — ITS CONTENTS. ITS SEVERITY. - POINTS OF EXAMHOW THE TRIAL WAS TO BE CONDUCTED. EXECU TERROR OF A CRUSADE. CRUSADE AGAINST THE NICHOLAS DE HUSSINITZ.- BOLDNESS MOORS. INDIGNATION OF THE BOHEMIANS. - OF ZISCA. COURSE OF JOHN DOMINIC. HE IS CONVINCED THAT ARMS ARE NECESSARY TO SUBDUE THE BOHEMIANS. Nov. 22, 1417-APRIL 15, 1418. WHILE the council at Constance was rent into fac tions by intrigues to elect a pope, Bohemia became more than ever a scene of civil discord. The Hussites were steadily increasing in numbers and in confidence. The course of the council, instead of regaining its lost adherents, alienated many who might otherwise have sustained it. Nothing was done to restore to that body the respect and confidence which had been destroyed by the execution of Huss and Jerome. The action of the university carried with it many who, until that time, had remained wavering and undecided. The clergy who adhered to the council became more thoroughly alarmed. They had CH. XI] PAPAL PARTY AT PRAGUE. 317 exhausted all their energies in attempting to breast the storm; but their very efforts only recoiled upon themselves. They provoked and exasperated where conciliation would have been policy. Justifying, as they did, the execution of Huss, and invoking the interference of the secular power, they forfeited that respect and security which they might have claimed had they quietly attended to their own duties. They by no means limited their demands to being left unmolested in their own persons and spheres of labor. The storm which they invoked upon the heads of others, was thus brought down upon their own. Refusing toleration, it is not strange that the measure which they meted should have been measured to them again. They occupied the position, and were regarded in the light, of allies to an invading army— designed to oppress, crush, and extirpate the followers of Huss. They were not merely misguided men and teachers of error, but-in the circumstances of the kingdom-revolutionists in principle, and traitors in fact; and so the Hussites, on repeated occasions, felt constrained to deal with them. Stripped of a large part of their revenues, the edge of their orthodoxy was sharpened by the exasperation of their feelings. Some of their churches-we may presume already vacated by them, or perhaps closed by interdict-were given up by Wenzel to the services of the new worship. Amid the civil disorder, it was not surprising that men destitute of principle, and fond of fishing in troubled waters, should abound. Robbers and bandits gladly seized the occasion to commit deeds of violence, which could be charged to the persecuting zeal of the Hussites, but of which the latter were innocent. The craven and timid monarch, who would sooner see both parties overthrown and his kingdom. desert than have his own indolence or gluttony disturbed, abandoned at this moment the duties of his post. Unwilling to commit himself fully to either party, fearful on the one side of being accounted a heretic, and on the other of offending the partisans and followers of Huss, who were overwhelmingly in the ascendant, he withdrew from Prague, and left it the spoil and prey of conflicting parties-torn by faction, or private malice and violence, now loosened from restraint. We are only surprised that the party of reform should have exhibited so much self-control. The king, intent only upon his own ease and indulgence, had fled to his castle in the country, leaving his whole kingdom to the mercy of insurrection and anarchy. The presence and authority of the more powerful Bohemian nobles, sometimes perhaps encouraging revolution and violence, were generally the best security for peace and order. Each controlled his own vassals; and the overwhelming majority of this nobility on the side of the reformers, overawed all organized opposition. The council had good reason for anxiety as to the effect of their own proceedings upon the Bohemian people. They saw themselves virtually defied. Their authority was contemned, and their spiritual claims were openly derided. Not one of the four hundred nobles whom they had summoned before them had shown regard enough for their commands or threat Cu. XI.] GERSON'S TREATISE ON THE CUP. 319 enings to appear before the commissioners appointed to sit in judgment upon their case. In the present state of affairs, it was vain to think of subduing them by violent measures. The forces necessary for such an attempt could not easily be got together. In these circumstances the council did what it should have done first and only-employed the weapons of reason and argument. Gerson was employed to draw up a treatise on the communion of the cup, in order to refute the positions and opinions of the Bohemian heretics.1 His work is a strange mixture of sound sense and absurd assumption, of indisputable truth and unwarranted inference. He concedes nearly, if not quite, all upon which Jacobel based his argument the plain command of scripture, the practice of the early church, and the authority of the Christian fathers. He admits the scriptures moreover to be the supreme authority, paramount to all else, whether traditions, or decrees of councils, or papal bulls, or canon law, and, in face of all this, places the authority of the church, and the dangers of desecrating the sacred symbols, over against the clear authority of the word of God. It was the doctrine of transubstantiation that blinded him. His work is a psychological curiosity. The intellectual giant of his age is caught in his own toils; he is the dupe of his own logic. His treatise was a mere waste of ink and labor. It proved to be perfectly harmless and ineffectual in Bohemia. Jacobel could afford to leave it unanswered, or rather, he had answered it before it was written. Van der Hardt, iii. 766. Nor could the difficulty of the council have been much relieved, when, at its instance, Maurice of Prague took up the pen against the Calixtines-as the advocates of the communion of the cup now be gan to be called. His treatise was brought out towards the close of the year (1417). But more forcible arguments were needed to convert to the views of the council those whose innate sense of justice had been so outraged by the execution of Huss. The emperor exerted himself to check the torrent of innovation that was sweeping over the land. Some of his letters have been preserved, but however they may attest the strength of his feelings, or the energy of his will, they do little credit either to his head or heart. One of them is addressed to the inhabitants of Launa,1 a city on the Eger, among whom the views of Huss had made such progress before he left Prague for Constance, that he addressed them words of counsel and exhortation. In this letter Sigismund speaks of the urgency with which his brother and some of the Bohemian nobles had prayed him to unite with the council, in order to put an end to the troubles introduced into the kingdom by pernicious innovations; he makes mention of his brother, whom he despised and at this very time was accusing of heresy, in terms of fraternal and affectionate regard-as though he had never robbed him of the imperial crown, or thrust him in prison— and declares the deep anxiety he feels that nothing may occur to the prejudice of him or his kingdom. After this exordium, in which the hypocrite stands 1 1 Mon. Hus. i., Epis. xiv. Launa is sometimes written Launy. |