Page:The life & times of Master John Hus by Count Lützow.djvu/110

Hus, while officiating at the funeral of Canon Peter Vserub, who had been a great pluralist, had declared that he would not accept as gift the whole world on the condition of dying possessed of so many benefices. Hus was lastly accused of having in his sermons generally strongly attacked the priests and lowered them in the estimation of the laymen. Hus replied in a lengthy and spirited letter to the archbishop, which is, unfortunately, not devoid of the scholastic hair-splitting then fashionable at the universities. Yet there is no doubt that Hus was entirely in the right, particularly when he laid stress on the baseness of extorting money from the poor as a condition of administering the sacraments to them. As Professor Tomek has truly written, such conduct proves to what a low level the clergy of Prague had sunk at this period. The learned professor has also pointed out that the conduct of the priests blamed by Hus was in direct contravention of the article 65 of the statute of Ernest, Archbishop of Prague, who had some time previously endeavoured to reform the Bohemian Church. Nevertheless, Archbishop Zbynek henceforth showed less favour to Hus, and soon after the complaint of the priests he deprived him of his office of preacher to the synod. It must be admitted that the conduct of Hus at this period was not conciliatory. Ever zealous for the reform of the Bohemian Church—this, not a change in the doctrine of the church, he considered the purpose of his life—Hus addressed to Archbishop Zbynek a letter which, as Dr. Lechler, a Protestant divine, has truly written, reaches the extreme limit of that which is permissible to a priest when writing to his ecclesiastical superior. In this letter Hus interceded for the priest Nicholas of Velenovic, surnamed Abraham. Abraham had preached at Prague without permission, and had been called to account by Canon John Kbel, one of the most strenuous opponents of church-reform. When questioned, Abraham did not deny the offence, but declared that he believed that not only priests, but laymen also, had the right to