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stood to those of the Mediæval Church, and saw more clearly the necessity for vigorous legislative reform as well as for a revival of religious life. But in one important matter, both of them belonged to the age which was passing away, and not to the generation which was to prepare the way for the movement which was to carry out what Huss had begun. At the Council of Constance the disciples of the Angelical Doctor and the Master of the Sentences sat side by side with men who are still celebrated for the elegance of their Latinity or for the re-discovery of forgotten Classics. Huss and Wyclif were schoolmen. Both of them, indeed, are still remembered as champions of their native languages; and both of them preached and wrote powerfully in them, when they were addressing themselves to the populace. But their minds were thoroughly in bondage to Scholasticism: when they wrote for the learned, they wrote in syllogisms. Wyclif’s more logical mind saw through the absurdity of the accidens sine substantia, with which Huss was perfectly satisfied: but both Huss’ defence and Wyclif’s denial of Transubstantiation were alike based upon scholastic grounds. A rebellion against Philosophy, as it was then understood, was as necessary for the emancipation of human thought as a rebellion against Sacerdotalism. When the Reformation came, Philosophy was its foe; Literature was its friend. The sympathies of Wyclif, Huss, and Jerome of Prague were with the decaying Scholasticism of the Middle Ages, and not with the dawning Revival of Letters.
There were standing by the fires in which Huss and Jerome perished, men who most unconsciously were to do something to set forward the cause for which they died. Poggio and Æneas Sylvius have left us accounts of the constancy of their deaths. The tone in which they write shows how very cold Faith was to become in the age which was yet an indispensable preparation for the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century. Æneas Sylvius says: “We don’t find that any of the philosophers ever suffered death with so much courage as they endured the fire.[1]” Poggio is similarly reminded, not of the saints of Christianity, but of the heroes of Paganism. He calls the account of Jerome’s death “a History so much like to those of Antiquity. Mutius Scævola did not express more constancy when he saw his arm burnt than Jerome did at the sight of his whole body in the flames.”[2] The South of Europe had to go through a period of revived Paganism before the North could produce men who should unite the enthusiasm of Huss and Jerome with the scholarship and literary culture of Æneas Sylvius and Poggio.
The deficiencies of John Huss as a Reformer were the noblest testimony to the beauty of his character as a man. He was unconscious of the fact that he was playing a great part in history. He possessed an extraordinary gift of inspiring strong personal affec-
