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Here Huss remained for eight days under an armed guard. Then he was removed to a pestilential dungeon close to a sewer, in a Dominican convent on the Rhine. Chlum hastened to inform Sigismund of the conduct of the Cardinals. The Emperor was at first extremely angry, and threatened to break open the doors of the prison if Huss were not released. But when he arrived in Constance, he was informed that the grant of a safe-conduct to a heretic was beyond the powers of any temporal prince. In that age, the Church claimed a coercive jurisdiction, at least over the clergy, as of right, and not as a concession of the temporal power: it was only when blood was to be shed that she became fastidious about wielding the secular sword. Though he was a man of honour, and his conscience long remained ill at ease on the subject, Sigismund was a devout Churchman; and if ever superstition can be pleaded in palliation of a breach of the moral law, surely it can be pleaded on behalf of one who yields to the express commands of an authority which he believes to be infallible. That faith must not be kept with heretics to the prejudice of the Catholic faith, was and is as much a doctrine of the Roman Church[1] as the doctrine of Transubstantiation or of the Immaculate Conception. Had Sigismund delivered John Huss out of the hands of the Council, he would have deliberately proclaimed himself a heretic, and have brought about the dissolution of an assembly which was on the point of effecting that Reunion of Christendom which had been the noblest object and the most ambitious dream of his life.
Never, indeed, since the darkness closed in around the Church, had the prospects of Reform, to the superficial observer, appeared so fair. Never, in the whole history of the Middle Ages, was so formidable a blow aimed at the Papacy, as the deposition of a Pope by a General Council. And not only was the Papal authority declared to be inferior to the authority of the Council: it seemed as if doubts were beginning to arise in the minds of Churchmen as to the mysterious efficacy of Episcopal consecration. An assembly which attempted to go back to the traditions of the Undivided Church, listened with approval while the Cardinal of Florence declared that “an ignorant Bishop was a mitred ass.” A crowd of courtiers whom the Pope had made Bishops of Italian villages or Eastern cities which they had never seen, had come to Constance to support their patron, by sheer force of numbers, against the attacks of Archbishops who were the equals of Princes, and Bishops who ruled in the Council-chambers of Kings. They were now told that the representatives of culture and learning were to be on a level with the descendants of the Apostles. Generals of Orders, Doctors of Divinity and of Civil and Canon Law, Proctors of absent Bishops and Proctors of Chapters, were to have equal voices with Cardinals, Bishops, and Abbots. Even lay Princes or their representatives voted on all matters not “de fide.” Moreover, the Council was to be divided
- ↑ L’Enfant, vol i., p. 514.
