This brief note on the state of Europe about the time of the birth of Hus is in many respects applicable to Bohemia. Yet the geographical and ethnographical position of the country and its history placed Bohemia in a position that was somewhat different from that of Western Europe. The country first received Christianity from the East, and though it afterwards acknowledged the rule of Rome—forming at first part of the archdiocese of Maintz in Germany, and being since the time of Charles IV. under the jurisdiction of the archbishop of Prague—yet it is certain that many of the rites and regulations of Rome were accepted in Bohemia later than in most European countries. Celibacy of the clergy became general at a late period and very gradually. Communion in the two kinds continued to be customary up to the fourteenth century, though the learned work of the gifted Professor Kalousek has proved[1] that it had probably died out before the time of Hus. The Bohemian exile, Paul Stransky, writing in the seventeenth century, states that the Eastern Church continued to have adherents among humbler men in Bohemia even after Romanism had been generally accepted. If we consider the great tenacity of the Bohemian people, which has so often been blamed by its enemies and praised by its friends, it does not appear improbable that this may have been the case, at least for a considerable period. Thus when the terrible persecution of all opponents of Rome that began in Bohemia in 1620 was ended by the “Toleranz Patent” of the Emperor Joseph II. in 1781, it was ascertained that in outlying parts of the country many peasants had, during this long period, continued to hold religious services according to the Hussite rites.
It is at any rate certain that, during the latter part of the nineteenth century, many prominent Russian scholars such as Novikov, Helferding, Vasiljew, and Palmov have, following the example of Stransky, maintained that the connection of
- ↑ O Historii Kalicha v. dobach predhusitskych (The history of the chalice in the period anterior to Hus).
