John Huss: his life, teachings and death, after five hundred years/Preface
PREFACE
John Huss belongs not to Bohemia alone. He has a place in the religious history of Europe and the West. For the three communions of Christendom his career has an interest. As for the Greek church, some of its historians find in his preaching. and the preaching of his predecessors a reminiscence of the original type of Christianity prevalent in Bohemia which, they hold, was of Oriental origin. The Roman Catholic communion cannot forget that his personality and teachings occupied the attention of the famous council of Constance and was the concern of the great theologians and churchmen of his age, and that his sentence to death as a heretic threatened the permanent alienation of Bohemia from the apostolic see and also involved that country in some of the most lamentable religious wars Europe has seen. Individual Catholics may follow Bishop Hefele and admire Huss’s moral heroism in the face of death, but no official proposition has been made to remove the opprobrium which was cast upon his name by the council of Constance as the church has done in the case of Joan of Arc, from whom it has not only removed the condemnatory sentence of a contemporary ecclesiastical court but whom it has even beatified.
To Protestants Huss appears as a forerunner of the Reformation by his assertion of the authority of the Scriptures and his definition of the church. Moreover, to all who follow with interest the progress of toleration in matters of religious opinion and general thought, he occupies the place of a martyr to the sacred rights of conscience. A modern circle, whose bounds cannot be well defined, may find in him an advocate of the principle that in the religious domain, so far as human judgment goes, the criterion of a Christian profession is daily conduct—a criterion expressed in the maxim, often quoted by Huss: “By their fruits ye shall know them.”
Some will be attracted to Huss chiefly by the fidelity to conviction which he maintained even in the presence of a horrible death; others by those principles which he defined with more or less clearness and which were opposed to the system built up during the Middle Ages and abhorred by the churchmen and theologians of Huss’s own age.
From whatever standpoint he may be regarded, as a heretic or as an advocate of forgotten Scriptural truth, as a contumacious rebel against constituted church authority or as an advocate of the just rights of conscience, the five-hundredth anniversary of his death at Constance, July 6, 1915, will again call attention to his personality and his teachings and, as is hoped, promote the study of the foundations of church authority in such an irenic spirit that the cause of the mutual recognition of Christians, one of the other, may be advanced. Is it too much to hope that the solemn study of this man’s Christian aims and death may promote the disposition to regard with tolerance doctrinal errors when the persons who hold them are moved with devotion to the person of Christ and the promotion of good-will among men?
This biography is intended not only to set forth the teachings and activity of John Huss and the circumstances of his death but also to show the perpetuation of his influence upon the centuries that have elapsed since he suffered at the stake. “He being dead yet speaketh.”
In departing from Huss’s own spelling of his name—Hus—which is the usage in Bohemia, I am influenced by the fact that the form Huss is more familiar to our eyes and agreeable to our general usage in spelling. It is to be noted that Loserth, the author of the volume, Wiclif and Hus, has adopted the form Huss in his article in the Herzog Encyclopedia, and Karl Müller also in his Church History. As for the spelling of Bohemian names written with an accent, as Paleč, they are given in this volume as Palecz—this spelling representing the pronunciation in the Czech tongue. The name of the king contemporary with Huss is given as Wenzel| rather than Wenceslaus, the Latin form, or Vaklav, the Bohemian form, although there is an inconsistency when the saint is called St. Wenceslaus|.
The author is not acquainted with Bohemian. Such a knowledge, so far as he is able to make out, is not necessary to a just and full study of Huss. His Bohemian writings, which are not translated, are of a homiletic and devotional character and add nothing to our knowledge of his teachings and only a few facts in his career. His chief works are all in Latin, into which his letters, so far as they were written in Czech, have been translated. Moreover, most of the works of Bohemian authors on the subject of Huss are found in German, as by Palacky|, or in English, as the two recent works by Lützow. All the Latin writings have been consulted. Moreover, I have used the chief Life of Huss written in Bohemian, that of Doctor Flajshans, in a translation made for my private use by one of the Bohemian students of the Western Theological Seminary, Mr. Alois Husak.
The following is a list of original authorities upon which the life of Huss must be based and also a list of most of the secondary works bearing on the subject. All have been used in the preparation of this volume except the Czech works of Huss which have not been translated into Latin, and the writings of Tomek.
HUSS’S LATIN WRITINGS
{{hi|1em|Documenta Mag. J. Hus. 1403–1418. Ed. Francis Palacky. Prague, 1869, pp. 755. Contains Huss’s letters, Mladenowicz’s full account of Huss from his journey to Constance to his death, the different lists of charges made against Huss and one hundred and twenty other official documents, with some added matter translated from the Bohemian, Huss’s alleged catechism, etc. It would be difficult to find such a full and well-organized collection of materials bearing on the life of any other historic character.}}
HUSS’S CZECH WRITINGS
TRANSLATIONS
OTHER AUTHORITIES
MODERN WORKS