from exercising his functions as a priest, except in his own parish church, during half a year. Janov died in the prime of his life in 1393, and retained his canonry up to that time.
There is sufficient proof that Matthew of Janov was a very voluminous writer, but his works have reached us in a very incomplete state, and they were entirely unknown before the present century. It is not difficult to account for the almost complete oblivion into which these important works had fallen. Though the teaching of Matthew was on many points similar to that of the Hussites, yet no reverence for his person and his memory was felt by them. They could not refrain from contrasting his recantation with the very different behaviour of Hus under similar circumstances. If some of his works have been preserved through the agency of the party that favoured Church reform, this was because such writings were attributed to Wycliffe or Hus. The adherents of the Church of Rome were, of course, anxious that, after his recantation, the former heretic theories of Matthew should, as far as possible, be buried in oblivion. They, not without reason, regarded some of the opinions of Matthew as most dangerous for their Church. The celebrated Protestant divine Neander, who perhaps has studied the works of Janov with more care than any one else, declares that a thorough study of Janov's works proves that, independently of Wycliffe, there existed in Bohemia at the end of the fourteenth century a strong reaction against the Roman hierarchy, founded on principles somewhat similar to those of the later German reformers. In his Kirchengeschichte, also, Neander has expressed the opinion that the views of Hus not only did not go farther than those of Matthew
