Page:The future of Bohemia by Seton-Watson (1915).pdf/12

enemies, which were not so easily refuted before the days of printing as in later days. But it is certain that he accepted all the main dogmas of the Roman Church. For example, the view so fiercely held by the theologians of that day and so often challenged by subsequent reformers, that the unworthiness of the priest does not affect the validity of the sacrament, was never challenged by Hus, and indeed was more than once publicly affirmed by him. Englishmen may well be proud of Wycliffe’s influence upon Hus; but that influence was almost certainly less dogmatic than practical. In a famous message to his own congregation of the Bethlehem Chapel he referred to “Blessed England,” but it would seem that his admiration for Wycliffe sprang from his zeal for the purification of the Church from existing abuses, not from any desire to overthrow the existing order of the ecclesiastical world. It can be, and has been, quite seriously argued that Hus never questioned any dogma which had obtained the sanction of the Church up to his day; Papal Infallibility, which he did challenge, was of course widely upheld even in the fifteenth century, but was not erected into a dogma till 1870. But on the other hand no one can pretend to deny that his whole influence, the whole trend of his life and teachings was contrary to the Papal claims, and in favour of what afterwards came to be known as the Reformation. Luther rightly regarded Hus as his forerunner, and on a famous occasion exclaimed, “We have all been Hussites, without knowing it.”