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40

He felt the burden of the Lord and His Word was upon him and he looked at the Hussite affairs and the affairs of the world through the eyes of the Bible. Focussing his attention to the Kingdom which is not of this world, Chelc̄icky̍ returned time and again to the kingdoms of men, and not even the most modern and most daring thinkers ventured to postulate with such relentless and thoroughgoing logic the claim of the sovereignty of the rule of God over the affairs of the humansociety as did the wizard of Chelc̄ice.

In the books which he began writing at his country retreat we sense a passionate popular protest against the cruel moral irresponsibility of the Hussites dependent for their intellectual priming on nothing more reliable than university professors suffering from acidosis of the head and heart, and against the similarly cruel ignorance of the crusaders who depended for their ethical balance on the immaculate perception of the Pope of Rome. He wrote these protests in a popular style often circumlocutious, sometimes involved, but always of such a quality that they remain "among the few medieval literary works which can even today captivate our interest."44

Because of his high moral integrity and new approach


44 The Cambridge Medieval History, vol.VIII, p.87.