39
binding and loosing, the power of giving and withholding the body of Christ, he did not in the abstract deny to the Clergy; but the moment such doctrines were so understood as to involve—and in an age in which Balthasar Cossa could be a Pope and Albert of Uniczow an Archbishop, they inevitably did involve at every turn—the calling of evil good and good evil, Huss was at war with them. This practical, pastoral bent of his mind saved him at once from the mediæval danger of Mysticism, and from the Protestant danger of Dogmatism. It constituted his great excellence as a religious teacher; but it constituted also the weakness of his position as a Reformer.
John Huss was indeed a Protestant before Protestantism, rather than a Reformer before the Reformation. He viewed the corruptions of the Church too much from the point of view of the pulpit,—it may almost be said of the confessional. It was in this respect that he most conspicuously fell behind Wyclif. The abolition of the Papal supremacy, of religious orders, of monasteries, of the enforced celibacy of the clergy, of Latin services, of Chantries and endowments for Masses,—all these measures Wyclif saw to be necessary conditions of any permanent Reform. Huss denounced the abuses and the erroneous doctrines connected with these institutions, instead of demanding the abolition of the institutions with which they were indissolubly bound up. From the want of a definite plan of Reform, such as he might have bequeathed to them, the Bohemian nation, agreeing in nothing but in reverence for his name, speedily became split up into two factions; one of which demanded reforms too moderate to be effectual, and too moderate to be lasting; while the other drifted into extravagances almost as wild, if not as immoral, as those of the Anabaptists of the succeeding century. When we consider the enormous influence which he wielded during his lifetime and the devotion which his memory inspired after his death, we cannot help feeling that had Huss possessed something of the political common-sense of Wyclif or of our Edwardian Reformers, the result of the Bohemian Reformation might have been very different to what it was. It is melancholy to reflect that a nation which has perhaps suffered more in defence of religious and political liberty than any other in Europe, should now be a province of the Austrian Empire, covered with the hideous Pagan temples which attest the triumph of Jesuitism,[1] the most immoral development of that religion against the immorality of which Huss protested. They have laboured, and others have entered into their labours.
Wyclif was, as we have seen, a more thorough, a more violent but also a more statesmanlike reformer than John Huss. He was more conscious than Huss of the antagonism in which his principles
- ↑ Almost every Gothic Church in Bohemia was destroyed in the troubles of the Hussite Wars.
