Page:A history of Bohemian literature.pdf/238

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LUTHER AND LUCAS
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records give no reason for this change; but Blahoslav's statement that "the king investigated the doctrine of the Unity and decided in its favour" is most improbable. The influence of some powerful noblemen who had joined the brethren probably secured for the Unity what was really only the tacit toleration of its existence. The fiction that only the Utraquist Church, which was the "State Church," and the Roman creed were recognised in Bohemia was maintained up to a far later date. The last years of the eventful life of Lucas were influenced by the appearance of Luther. Luther's teaching soon became known in Bohemia, and was welcomed by the people of that country. They felt as if their isolation, which had long weighed on them, was ended when even the Germans, the mortal enemies of Utraquism, communicated in the two kinds. The more advanced Utraquists specially sympathised with German Protestantism, and it did not for a moment seem impossible that Bohemia should adopt the teaching of Luther. The brethren, and Brother Lucas in particular, however, declared that they should always maintain their own community distinct from both the German Protestants and the Bohemian Utraquists. They have often been praised for this, but it is very probable that by joining the German Protestants the Bohemians would have obtained powerful allies when, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Jesuit reaction attacked their country. The isolation in which the Bohemian brethren, and to a lesser extent the Bohemian Utraquists, continued, alone accounts for the incredible apathy with which the German Protestants viewed the suppression of Protestantism in Bohemia. At the negotiations which preceded the Treaty of Westphalia, the