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the duty of private judgment. And to a very considerable extent he maintained also what we may call the political right of Liberty of Conscience. The whole tenour of his protests against the ill-treatment of good and hard-working priests on account of opinions which in some cases he admitted to be erroneous, leaves upon the mind the impression that he means to condemn all persecution on account of opinion. He constantly urges that those who accuse others of error, should refute and convince, instead of trying to suppress them. But when asked at Constance what was to be done with heretics who were deaf to all argument, he admitted that they must be punished in the body, he does not say burned to death.[1] If an answer made under such circumstances is to be taken as representing the settled opinion of the speaker, we may at all events feel sure that he would have interpreted the term “Heretic” liberally. Although he could not quite get rid of the mediæval notion which made Heresy a crime or worse than a crime; yet in his own works the term is more often applied unlawful and immoral practices, such as Simony, than to diversities of doctrine. The fact is that the toleration which he demanded was a toleration by the Church as well as by the State. He would have been beyond his age indeed if he had seen that it might be right for the State to allow the public preaching of one whom the Church might rightly condemn. His advocacy of Toleration sprang not from any abstract conclusion of political science, not from what is called in modern times liberality of mind, but from the breadth of his Christian sympathies. He wished not that those whom he denounced as heretics should be suffered to live, but that the Christian Church should include all whose lives were the lives of Christians. In this respect he shows a largeness of heart which contrasts very favourably with the temper of most of the Reformers of the Sixteenth Century.
The great work of John Huss was to make a protest on behalf of the rights of Conscience. The most marked characteristic of his mind and of his character was an intense, an unsurpassed conscientiousness. This conscientiousness, this scrupulous sincerity, was the source of all his Protestantism. The key-note of his Theology and of his life is sounded in the title of one of his works, the treatise "On the sufficiency of the law of Christ." The Gospel was to him primarily a law, a rule of life; his great aim was to find out what was the will of Christ upon the smallest details of his own life and of the lives of his flock. On their purely contemplative or speculative side he was ready to accept the traditional beliefs of his age, or those beliefs modified by that Augustinism which was as the life-blood of the sound part of the Mediæval Church. With doctrines which did not directly affect practice, such as Transubstantiation and Purgatory, he had no quarrel. The power of
- ↑ L’Enfant, vol. 1., p. 342.
