of course, specially referred to the sale of indulgences. In accordance with this decree, three young men who ventured to interfere with the vendors of the indulgences were seized and publicly executed. A band of students obtained possession of the corpses, and singing the Church hymn "Isti sunt sancti" carried them for burial to the Bethlehem Chapel. This incident marks an important date in the Hussite movement, which now for the first time assumed a revolutionary character. The Pope replied to these attacks on the authority of the Church by renewing in severer terms the decree of excommunication against Hus: all true Christians were forbidden to have any intercourse with him, food and drink were to be supplied to him only under pain of excommunication; all religious services were to be suspended in every town which he entered; finally, Christian burial was to be refused him, and the Bethlehem Chapel was to be destroyed. The Germans, obeying the orders of the Pope, attempted forcibly to take possession of the chapel, but were repulsed by the adherents of Hus.
The king, being still anxious to reconcile the contending parties, begged Hus temporarily to leave Prague, and he immediately obeyed the request of Venceslas. The king promised to endeavour during his absence to put an end to the conflict, so that his exile might not be of long duration.
Archbishop Albik, finding that his conciliatory attitude had only resulted in raising up enemies against him among both the contending parties, now resigned his office. He was succeeded by Conrad of Vechta, formerly Bishop of Olomouc. The new archbishop, on the suggestion of the king, convoked a synod of the clergy (1413), but its deliberations had no satisfactory results, as the reform party still maintained that changes in the government of the Church could alone restore order; while the supporters of the Pope declared that the suppression of all resistance to ecclesiastical authority was the only measure required to obtain peace. A special commission was now appointed by the king, before which the more prominent divines of both parties were summoned to appear. Still the adherents of Hus, on the whole, maintained a conciliatory attitude, while the partisans of the Pope practically declined any sort of compromise with men whom they considered as heretics. King Venceslas, whose honesty of purpose it
