[ And what title has the nobility to the land and people? It got it by tricks. ] He who is not God’s has no right to possess or to hold anything that belongs to God, unless he has taken possession of it illegally and by violence. Thus, contrary to the divine law, our fathers bought and established illegal claims for us … and this is our natural heritage: poverty, shame, and death, and after that, hell. [ Shame, trickery, falsehood, and cruelty – these are the true signs of our coats-of-arms. But God shall regard all these unlawful property holders as traitors of the kingdom of God. ]
And if you who are heavy and round with fat object, saying, “Our fathers have bought these people and those manors for our inheritance,” then, indeed, they made an evil business and an expensive bargain! For who has the right to buy people, to enslave them and to treat them with indignities as if they were cattle led to slaughter? You prefer dogs to people whom you cuss, despise, and beat, from whom you extort taxes and for whom you forge fetters … while at the same time you will say to your dog, “Setter, come here and lie down on the pillow.” Those people were God’s before you bought them!
Who has the right to buy people? They were God’s and … after they were enslaved … Christ Jesus bought this people to himself, not with silver or gold, but with his own precious blood and terrible suffering. He loves one human being more than all the riches of the earth together… The heavenly Lord redeems and buys (the people) for his inheritance. And the earthly lord buys them in order to increase his pleasures through their pain, to make a bridge out of their bent backs, to make himself a soft bed by their labor; and he puts on them all the burden of his groaning table (as rich men have), of his bright and soft garments and other physical pleasures. Look, you fat one, what a sodomitic life you have prepared for your people! What will you say on the Day of Judgment when the Lord will seat Himself on the judgment seat, and when all injustices committed against this people – yes, the very people who He Himself bought with His blood – will be arraigned against you? And He will say to you, “As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.[405] Go to hell!”
… And no high titles, no archives, no records, no documents with seals … will save you from perdition.
CHAPTER 38
THE LAW OF MEN AND THE LAW OF CHRIST (CONCLUSION)
[ Chelčický recapitulates his account of how the early Church remained faithful to Christ for the first three hundred and twenty years, how the Emperor and the Pope made an alliance, bartering their powers, and how the faith became corrupted with the defilement of the Church. ]
But remember this, Christians who follow faith and arrange their life accordingly cannot in truth rule over each other in the manner of pagan rulership. A Christian lord cannot buy people and rule over them…
