Articles XXIII and XXIV demand for the true priest the right to preach in spite of a sentence of excommunication. Here, Huss explained that he had reference to an unjust sentence at variance with the written law and the Word of God. A priest conforming his life to God’s precepts has no business to cease from preaching nor should he stand in fear of an unjust prohibition as though it were a ground of condemnation. The Florentine cardinal Zabarella, remarked that there were laws demanding that even an unjust censure was to be dreaded. Huss answered that, as he remembered, there were eight, reasons for dreading excommunication. “No more than that?” retorted the cardinal, to which Huss replied: “There may be more.”
Article XXV stated that ecclesiastical censures are of antichrist invented by the clergy for the subjection of the people and its own exaltation. These the laity are under no obligation to obey.
Article XXVI: The interdict should not be laid upon the people, seeing that Christ did not fulminate this censure either in view of his own injuries or the treatment given to John the Baptist. Here d’Ailly again interposed that there were even worse things on this subject in the Treatise on the Church than this formula. Huss denied the form of the article.
The articles extracted from Huss’s work, written against Palecz, aroused most demonstration and clamor. The first asserted that if the pope, a bishop or prelate are in mortal sin they are not pope, bishop or prelate. After the reading of the original text, Huss said that the statement was true not only of prelates but also of kings. If a king was in mortal sin he was not a king in the sight of God. He quoted I Sam. 15: 26, where the Lord said through Samuel to Saul, who should have put the Amalekite to death but did not: “In that thou hast rejected my word I will also reject thee that thou mayest be king.” Although Saul in the sight of men
