It is with this then burning question that the treatise on simony[1] deals. It was stated by the adherents of all the contending popes that their opponents were heretics, and at that period, more than at any other, the accusation of heresy was scattered broadcast among the people. Hus desired to affirm that simony also is a form of heresy. Written at a time when Hus was incessantly accused of heresy by all those whom his denunciations of simony displeased, the book has, of course, an intensely personal note. In the first chapter Hus writes: “As simony is heresy, and as the evil denounce good men as heretics, I wish—as an admonition and confirmation for the good, and also for the correction of the evil—to define first of all what heresy is, that people may know whether those are heretics to whom they give that name, or whether they are themselves tainted by heresy.” Hus then gives a definition of heresy derived almost literally from St. Augustine, and identical with the one contained in his Super IV. Sententiarum.[2] In the following chapter Hus defines the three sources from which heresy springs; they are apostacy, blasphemy, and simony. Apostacy is committed by those who forsake God’s laws. Those are guilty of blasphemy who attempt to limit God’s power, or speak irreverently of him, or attribute to human force things that God alone can do; among the latter are the priests, who say that they are creators of God, that they create the body of God whenever they wish, and that they send to hell whomever they will. Even such a short extract from this chapter conveys an idea of the unlimited power which a clergy holding such views necessarily acquired over an uneducated population, and of the terrible consequences which such a power wielded by immoral and unscrupulous men was likely to produce.
In the third chapter Hus writes of the origin and development of simony. Its beginnings, he tells us, date from the
