Page:John Huss, his life, teachings and death, after five hundred years.pdf/280

mend my spirit”; and, moving his head as if bidding farewell and in prayer, he died, as the faithful Mladenowicz writes, in the Lord—exspiravit in Domino.

The tradition cannot be verified that to an old woman carrying wood to the stake Huss exclaimed: “Oh, simple piety!” Luther quotes the words in his Preface to some of Huss’s writings, 1537. The other tradition, that Huss said, “Today you are burning a Goose, but out of my ashes will be born a swan, whom you will not burn,“^[1] was not a prophecy spoken by him, but the invention of a later time. It occurs several times in Luther’s works and may have been made up in part from Huss’s own words and in part from those uttered by Jerome. “He hoped,” so he wrote in one of his letters, “that after his death God would raise up braver men to make bare the malice of antichrist and lose their lives for the truth of the Lord Jesus.” Jerome’s words were—referring to himself—that the council had condemned him falsely and unjustly, having found no evil in him, and that after his death he would return to trouble the consciences of its members with remorse. He cited them all to appear after one hundred years had passed, and in the presence of the most high God, the final Judge, to make reply to him.^[2]

When the executioners pushed down what remained of the body held by the chain, another load of wood was brought. The skull was broken with sticks, and the heart, which had been thrust through, was burned to ashes. At the palatine’s command the garments,^[3] held by executioners, were also

 

1. Hodic anserem uritis sed ex meis cineribus nascetur cygnus quem non assare poteritis.
2. Et ego post mortem meam relinquam in conscientia vestra remorsum et cito vos omnes ad respondeatis mihi coram altissimo et justissimo judice, infra centum annos. See Gieseler, 2: 3, pp. 417 sq.; Hefele 7: 213; Doc., 135, also 39; Mon., 2: 526.
3. Richental states that they consisted of two good coats of black cloth, a girdle with a silver-gilt clasp, two knives in the sheath, and a leather scrip, in which “there was probably some money.” The principal accounts of the scenes at the stake are by this author, by Mladenowicz and Barbatus. Doc., 323 sq., 557 sq.