go—distinct classes. There are the old Jews, orderly, law-abiding, honourable, observing the commands of Moses and the customs of their fathers, who on the Paschal night place a chair at their table and throw open the door for the expected Messiah, repeatedly to be disappointed at His non-arrival.
But there exists another party, and that very large and widespread. It is made up of such as have lost all faith in the Promises of God, who have cast aside the Law of Moses, who have little or no belief, and are inspired with bitter animosity against Christ and Christianity.
In leaving Vienna for Prague we had to cross the rim of the great Bohemian crater, and our road led us through Tabor, the famous Hussite stronghold. Tabor in Czech means a palisa ed enclosure. But the Hussites, pleased with its Scriptural name, called a neighbouring height Horeb, and a small lake Jordan. Tabor was fortified by the terrible Zizka, pronounced Schishka —the Czech " z " is sounded soft, almost like a French " j." He and his party rushed down into the plain, burning monasteries and massacring priests and monks. Their favourite amusement was to put these latter in tar-barrels which they set on fire, and they looked on and laughed at their agonies. The Catholics when they caught any Hussites burned them also, but at the stake.
Zizka early in life had lost one eye, but, later, he lost the other as well, a javelin having struck a tree near, sent a splinter into his sound eye, and deprived that of sight. He still remained Captain of the Hussites, and his greatest victories were won when he was totally blind. He and his Hussites were the forerunners of the Russian Bolsheviks. With his horde he swept down on Prague, and although the citizens were Calixtines, yet they went out in battle against him, dreading the atrocities they knew he would commit in the town should he penetrate its streets. He defeated them, but consented to negotiate with the citizens, and even with the Emperor Sigismund. During these negotiations Zizka died of the plague; whereupon his army split up into four factions, the Taborites, the Horebites, the Orphans and the Praguers.
There is a portrait of Zizka in the Strahow Monastery, and another, but it is a poor affair, in the National Museum, at Prague,
