Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 2.djvu/454

.oo BOHEMIA. 438 that suffrages for the dead were useless, that the Virgm could not help her devotees, and that the archbishop had erred in granting an indulgence to those who adored her image, and that the utterances of the holy doctors of the Church are not to be received.* 4. * „i Other earnest men who prepared the way for what was to tol- low were Henry of Oyta, Thomas of Stitny, John of Stekno, and Matthew of Cracow. Step by step the progress of free thought advanced, and when, in 1393, a papal indulgence was preached in Prague, Wenceslas Eohle, pastor of St. Martin's in the Altstadt, ventured to denounce it as a fraud, though only under his breath, for fear of the Pharisees. AU this, it is evident, could only be fa- vorable to the growth of Waldensianism, as is seen in the activity of the sectaries. It was missionaries from Bohemia who founded the communities in Brandenburg and Pomerania ; and, as we have seen, a well-informed writer, in 1395, asserts that they were num- bered by thousands in Thuringia, Misnia, Bohemia, Moravia, Aus- tria and Hungary, notwithstanding that a thousand of them had been converted within two years in the districts extending from Thuringia to Moravia.f . • ^u * While Bohemia was thus the scene of an agitation the out- come of which no man could foretell, a simUar movement was running a still more rapid course in England, which was destined to exercise a decisive influence on the result. The assaults of John Wickliff were the most serious danger encountered by the hierarchy since the Hildebrandine theocracy had been established. For the fii-st time a trained scholastic intellect of remarkable force and clearness, informed with all the philosophy and theology of the schools, was led to question the domination which the Church had acquired over the life, here and hereafter, of its members. It was not the poor peasant or artisan who found the Scriptures in contradiction to the teaching of the pulpit and the confessional and with the practical examples set by the sacerdotal class ; but it was a man who stood in learning and argumentative power on . Hofier, Prager Concilien, pp. 33, 37-9.-De Schweinitz, History of the Unitas Fratrum (Bethlehem, Pa., 1885, pp. 35-6). + Loserth, Hub und Wiclif, pp. 54, 56-7, 63-4, ««-«-^""f'J'^'^^lVtt Vaudois, p. I50.-Pseudo-Pilichdorf Tract, contra Waldens. c. 15 (Mag. B.b. Pat. Sin. 315).