Page:Bohemia under Hapsburg misrule (1915).pdf/168

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164
BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS

liturgy until the year 1096, after which nothing more is heard of the Slavic Church. Cyril and Methodius, who had come to Moravia at the request of Prince Rostislav, had in 867 been accused by the German missionaries of heresy, which accusation, however, Pope Hadrian found to be groundless. But the Slavic activity could not be maintained against German arrogance, and, as it was Bishop Wiching who soon after the death of Methodius banished the Slavic liturgy from Bohemia, so it was in the eleventh century again German priests who destroyed the last vestige of the incipient Slavic culture. The Slavic liturgy left the country to become permanently associated with the Greek Catholic Church in Russia, Serbia, and Bulgaria. What might have formed a bond between the various Slavic nations had been senselessly destroyed in Bohemia by the machinations of the German clergy.

Again it was Bohemia which was the first country, not only among the Slavs, but in the whole of Europe, to carry high the banner of religious freedom. The Germans boast of the contribution to freedom of thought by their Luther, and they constantly forget that a century before him Hus had prepared the ground for that religious dissent which was voiced by Luther and his contemporaries. In the fourteenth century Bohe-