led by these was still quite independent and
national.

The central figure of the Bohemian Reformation was John
Huss, or Hus, the son of a peasant. He was born in 1369 at
Husinetz--of which his own name is a contraction--in
Southern Bohemia. The principal events of his life, from the
time that he took his degree at the University of Prague
until his death at the stake, July 6, 1415, will be found in
Trench's sympathetic but discriminating narrative.

If we look for the proper forerunners of Huss, his true spiritual
ancestors, we shall find them in his own land, in a succession of
earnest and faithful preachers--among these Militz (d. 1374) and Janow
(d. 1394) stand out the most prominently--who had sown seed which could
hardly have failed to bear fruit sooner or later, though no line of
Wycliffe's writings had ever found its way to Bohemia. This land, not
German, however it may have been early drawn into the circle of German
interests, with a population Slavonic in the main, had first received
the faith through the preaching of Greek monks. The Bohemian Church
probably owed to this fact that, though incorporated from the first with
the churches of the West, uses and customs prevailed in it--as the
preaching in the mother tongue, the marriage of the clergy, communion in
both kinds--which it only slowly and unwillingly relinquished. It was
not till the fourteenth century that its lines were drawn throughout in
exact conformity with those of Rome. All this deserves to be kept in
mind; for it helps to account for the kindly reception which the seed
sown by the later Bohemian reformers found, falling as this did in a
soil to which it was not altogether strange.

John Huss took in the year 1394 his degree as bachelor of theology in
that University of Prague upon the fortunes of which he was destined to
exercise so lasting an influence; and four years later, in 1398, he
began to deliver lectures there. Huss had early taken his degree in a
school higher than any school of man's. He himself has told us how he
was once careless and disobedient, how the word of the Cross had taken
hold of him with strength, and penetrated him through and through as
with a mighty purifying fire. What he had learned in the school of
Christ he could not keep to himself. Holding, in addition to his
academical position, a lectureship founded by two pious laymen for the
preaching of the Word in the Bohemian tongue (1401), he soon sig