shall receive the crown of life.[1] These are my foundations: these the dishes with which my spirit is revived so that I may be courageous against all adversaries of the truth.
As for these doctors whom you mention, they refuse to act against their consciences. You know how Palecz used to talk in the old days at your house. And I know for a fact that Stanislaus held the remanence of the bread and recorded his views in a treatise; and he asked me before he began this disturbance if I would hold the same view along with him.[2] Subsequently he swore to it and then abjured it; and two years afterwards,[3] when Stiekna came with his treatise,[4] in his terror of the Archbishop and not knowing how to escape, he asserted on oath that he had not finished the treatise. Before he was summoned to the Archbishop’s court, he said, “The monk Stiekna must go on his knees before me and beg for his life, because he dared to charge my treatise with being a fresh graft of heresy.” How, then, can I believe that they would not be ready to act against their consciences? Is it to save their consciences that they call us
- ↑ James i. 12.
- ↑ See supra, p. 9.
- ↑ i.e., in 1405.
- ↑ John of Stiekna was a Cistercian monk long confused by historians with the reforming preacher of Prague, Conrad of Waldhausen. In one of his sermons for the Commemoration Day of Charles IV., Hus speaks of him as ‘the excellent preacher with the trumpet voice’ (Mon. ii. 41b). Of his strong nationalist sympathies we have evidence in his association in 1397 with the citizen Crux as one of the proctors of Queen Hedwig’s Polish College; while at one time, it would appear, he was a preacher at the Bethlehem. But in later years his sympathies with the reforming party cooled down. It is said, though the evidence is somewhat doubtful, that in 1393 he championed one of Boniface’s indulgences, while Hus tells us here of his later antagonism to Wyclif’s doctrine. Stiekna’s treatise is now lost.
