as a publican and gentile. What ground, therefore, is there for the argument from comparison [with those who put Christ to death]? Under the old law the disobedient person was to be put to death, therefore, also under the law of grace. Even Christ's disciples have been deceived by this argument from comparison, for after the manner of Elijah the prophet, they wanted the Samaritans who refused to receive Christ to be consumed by fire from heaven, saying: "Lord, wilt thou that we bid fire to come down from heaven and consume them?" That most good priest and best of masters reproved them, for the words follow that he, turning around, rebuked them, saying: "Ye know not what spirit ye are of, for the Son of Man came not to destroy souls but to save them," Luke 9:54–56.
This good Gospel the doctors did not turn to and so they have joined to their statements this sanguinary corollary—sanguinolentum corollarium[1]—and say: "If any of the clergy be found in Bohemia acting contrary to these premises or a single one of them, such an one is to be corrected by ecclesiastical censure and, if he refuses to be corrected, he is to be turned over to the secular tribunal." For a certainty in this
- ↑ This is one of the rare protests before the Reformation against the bloody practice of putting heretics to death. In his Reply to Eight Doctors, Mon., 1: 382 sqq., Huss takes up again at length the treatment of heresy. The definite position taken by the church was that they should be put out of the world. The laws of Frederick II ordered death by burning for all heretics and the church well knew that when it turned a heretic over to the civil power, though its sentence asked for mercy, the death penalty would follow. In fact, as Vacandard has shown, the ecclesiastical court sometimes actually pronounced the death penalty and carried it out, and popes and other ecclesiastics demanded on pain of excommunication the summary treatment by the civil authorities of persons condemned by the church. See Schaff: John Huss. It would have been well if Calvin and Beza had made the same distinction between the Old Testament and the New which Huss makes in the preceding paragraph. In this case, they would not have justified the execution of heretics upon the basis of the examples given in the Old Testament. A strong passage in Huss's treatise against indulgences, Mon., 1: 223, runs: "The Saviour taught Peter and in him his vicars and pontiffs in their necessities to flee to God in prayer and not to money or physical battle." For a more elaborate treatment of putting heretics to death, etc., see ad octo Doctores, Mon., 1: 393 sqq., 399 sqq.
