village or castle, throngs welcomed the preacher of the sacred truth. But gently had he “touched the tail of Behemoth, which is Satan, and Behemoth had opened his jaws to swallow up both him and his brethren. He is furious and charges with lying tongue many with heresy, blows up the flame of church censure, and sends his threats to neighboring regions, and yet at home Behemoth had not dared to touch his own neck.” Huss closed his letter by sending greetings “from the Church of Christ in Bohemia to the Church of Christ in England,” and saying that “the king and his entire cabinet, the queen’s barons, and the common people were for the Word of Jesus Christ.”
If we are to judge by the statements of this letter and the statements made in the appeal of the masters to the pope, June 25, 1410, the pressure to hear the preaching of the truth from the lips of Huss and by other preachers in Prague must have been very great. In the twenty-first chapter of his Treatise on the Church, Huss expresses himself as feeling that the time was one of religious awakening in which God in an unusual manner was revealing His truth to the people of Prague and enducing them with special power to endure under persecution. The party he represented was in some quarters called “the evangelical party.”[1]
The king gave proof of his favor for Huss by requesting that the archbishop reimburse the owners of Wyclif’s writings for their loss and, when he refused, Wenzel sequestrated the incomes of the clergy who were taking part in the proceedings of excommunication. When two doctors of Bologna arrived in Prague to announce John XXIII’s election, Wenzel and Sophia and a group of nobles interceded with them to use their influence in having Alexander’s bull withdrawn. But Huss had openly resisted church authority. He was under excommunication and the ban of the archbishop had behind it papal authority. No longer was it simply a ques-
- ↑ Doc., 12–14, 394. Mon., 1: 306, 331.
