We come now to the temper in which the two works are written as indicated by particular statements as well as the general drift. Huss is much less severe in his judgments of individuals than is Wyclif. The latter called Gregory XI a terrible devil—horrendus diabolus—and blessed God for bringing him to his death when He did. The cardinals he stigmatized as the very synagogue and nest of Satan and a nest of heretics.[1]
At times, in his English writings, he calls the pope the vicar of the fiend—the devil. Huss joins with Wyclif in saying that it might be well to get along without a pope, though not in such strong language, but nowhere uses such an expression as Wyclif's, enormous pride of the Western church—monstruosa superbia ecclesie occidentalis—or plainly denounces the last clause of Boniface's bull as to be detested.[2] Nor did Huss in his treatise directly repudiate the authority of church teachers such as Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventura, as Wyclif did, although, as his pages show, he put strange interpretations on some of the statements of the canon law and seems to have been at times under the constraint of usage in clinging to those statements rather than of conviction.
Huss, in other words, was much less severe in his judgment of individuals and more moderate in his language than his predecessor. Wyclif used a sharp blade and sometimes the acrimony of the pamphleteer. The Bohemian carried to his desk the homiletic instinct of the preacher addressing an audience whose welfare he held in mind. The one was governed somewhat by the love of the truth as a matter of intellectual determination; the other altogether by the love of the truth as a practical force in daily life.
In his last months in prison, Huss definitely accepted the distribution of the cup to the laity and exclaimed against the impiety of the council's act when it threatened every priest with the ban who dared to distribute it. On the other
