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cannot be shaken. Your friends and supporters have no little joy in your letters, although it is true they are known to few.^[1] To-day an embassy from the King of the French arrived at Constance.^[2]

 

XLIX. To John of Chlum

 

(Without date: March 6th, 1415^[3])

 

Every word you wrote in your last letter gave me excellent comfort. Our learned doctor of Biberach agreeth in his exposition with my own thoughts, though that adage of Cato’s holds good, “For dreams have no care,”^[4] and also God’s command that we hearken not to dreams.^[5] Yet I hope that the life of Christ, which I painted from His word at the Bethlehem in the hearts of men and which they wished to blot out from the Bethlehem—issuing first of all an order that there should be no preaching in chapels and in the Bethlehem, then afterwards that the Bethlehem should be razed to the ground^[6]—I hope, I say, that that life of Christ is being painted up in better fashion by other better preachers than myself amid the rejoicings of the people that love Christ’s life.^[7] Wherein I will rejoice—as saith our learned doctor^[8]—when I awake out of sleep, that is, when I rise from the dead. The writing too on the walls of the Bethlehem still abides,^[9] though Palecz is mightily

 

1. Licet constet valde paucis. Possibly it is the letters that are few.
2. March 5, 1415. See p. 190.
3. See p. 190.
4. See the pseudo Dicta Catonis (vel Disticha de Moribus), ed. Némethy, Pesth, 1895, lib. ii. No. 31; a favourite mediæval book of rhymed proverbs, as we see in the Piers Plowman.
5. Jer. xxix. 8.
6. P. 79.
7. Epist. Piissimæ: ‘Quisne negare potest per Lutherum factum esse.’
8. i.e., of Biberach; see p. 155.
9. P. 79.

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