This fate Huss feared for himself, and it is quite possible that he owed his deliverance to these appeals by Bohemia and Moravia. The protest of the signers, so many in number and of such high standing, it would have been audacity indeed in the council to have ignored.
The distribution of the cup to the laity in the city of Prague, to which reference is made in one of these appeals, was rendering, if possible, Huss’s case more difficult of satisfactory explanation. This practice introduced a new element of division. Huss had received news of it in prison. To us, extraordinary as it may seem, the withholding of the cup from laymen had become a general custom in the West. The original reason for it may have been either an effort to emphasize the distinction of the priesthood and the laity or to prevent profanation of the sacred blood by its being spilled or eructated by the receiver. The custom was justified by the shrewdest sophistry of which the mediæval theologians were capable, from Alexander of Hales, d. 1245, down. Once fixed by ecclesiastical considerations, the attempt was made to justify it by Scriptural authority. The best that could be done from this standpoint was done by Thomas Aquinas, who recalled that Christ distributed bread to the five thousand but not drink. However, if the reference were to be taken too seriously, it might have been argued that fish would have been a proper, if not a necessary, substitute for the wine.
But the practice was based upon other grounds. Anselm, a century or two before Aquinas, had insisted that the whole Christ was in the transmuted wine and the whole Christ in the transubstantiated bread; but Anselm did not resort to speculation to justify the withdrawal of the cup. Otherwise Alexander Hales, who insisted that it should be withheld for the purpose of teaching the laity the doctrine that the whole Christ is in each of the elements, that laymen might know that in partaking of the bread alone they are partaking of Christ’s full body. It remained for the council of Constance
