meekness, in the thought and in the strength of Him who had
borne so much more for sinners, the Just for the unjust; and so, in his
fire-chariot of a painful martyrdom, Huss passes from our sight.

Some may wonder that he, a reformer, should have been so treated by a
council, itself also reforming, and with a man like Gerson--_Doctor
Christianissimus_ was the title he bore--virtually at its head. But a
little consideration will dispel this surprise, and lead us to the
conclusion that a council less earnestly bent on reforms of its own
would probably have dealt more mildly with him. His position and theirs,
however we may ascribe alike to him and to them a desire to reform the
Church, were fundamentally different. They, when they deposed a pope,
where they proclaimed the general superiority of councils over popes,
had no intention of diminishing one jot the Church's authority in
matters of faith, but only of changing the seat of that authority,
substituting an ecclesiastical aristocracy for an ecclesiastical
monarchy--or despotism, as long since it had grown to be. And thus the
more earnest the council was to carry out a reformation in discipline,
the more eager was it also to make evident to all the world that it did
not intend to touch doctrine, but would uphold this as it had received
it. It is not then uncharitable to suspect that the leading men of the
council--like those reformers at Geneva who a century and a half later,
1553, sent Servetus to the stake--were not sorry to be able to give so
signal an evidence of their zeal for the maintenance of the faith which
they had received, as thus, in the condemnation of Huss, they had the
opportunity of doing. Nor may we leave altogether out of account that
the German element must of necessity have been strong in a council held
on the shores of the Bodensee; while in his vindication of Bohemian
nationality, perhaps an excessive vindication, Huss had offended and
embittered the Germans to the uttermost.

If any had flattered themselves that with the death of Huss the
Reformation in Bohemia had also received its death-blow, they had not
long to wait for a painful undeception. Words fail to describe the
tempest of passionate indignation with which the tidings of his
execution, followed within a year by that of Jerome, were received
there. Both were honored as martyrs, and already, in the fierce
exasperation of men's spirits against the authors of their doom, there
was a prop