57 2
ESSAYS ON LIBERTY
sincere and godly men. The condemnation of Hus is the proper test, because it was the extreme case of all. The council ,vas master of the situation, and ,vas crowded with men accustomed to disparage the authority of the Holy See and to denounce its acts. Practically, there was no pope either of Rome or Avignon. The Inquisition languished. There was the plausible plea of deference to the emperor and his passport; there ,vas the imperative consideration for the religious future of Bohemia. The reforming divines were free to pursue their own scheme of justice, of mercy, and of policy. The scheme they pursued has found an assiduous apologist in their new historian. "To accuse the good fathers of Constance of conscious bad faith H is impossible. To observe the safe - conduct would have seemed absurd "to the most conscientious jurists of the counci1." In a nutshell, "if the result ,vas inevitable, it \vas the fault of the system and not of the judges, and their conscience might \\"ell feel satisfied." There may be more in this than the oratorical pre- caution of a scholar \vanting nothing, \vho chooses to be discreet rather than explicit, or the ,vavering utterance of a mind not ahvays strung to the same pitch. It is not the craving to rescue a favourite or to clear a record, but a fusion of unsettled doctrines of retrospective contempt. I'here is a demonstration of progress in looking back ,vithout looking up, in finding that the old world \vas wrong in the grain, that the kosmos which is inexorable to folly is indifferent to sin. Man is not an abstraction, but a manufactured product of the society with which he stands or falls, which is answerable for crimes that are the shado,v and the echo of its o\vn nobler vices, and has no right to hang the rogue it rears. Before you lash the detected class, mulct the undetected. Crime \vithout a culprit, the unavenged victim who perishes by no man's fault, la\v without respónsibility, the virtuous agent of a vicious cause-all these are the signs and pennons of a philosophy not recent, but rather inarticulate still and inchoate, which a,vaits analysis by Professor Flint. No propositions are simpler or more comprehensive
