Hus Arrives at Constance.
On his journey Hus was everywhere welcomed heartily and at Biberach even
triumphantly. He reached Constance, a beautiful city of fifty thousand
inhabitants, on Nov. 3, and found lodgings with Fida, "a second widow
of Sarepta," in St. Paul St.,--now Hus St.--near the Schnetz Gate, not
far from the abode of Pope John XXIII. On the same day came the historic
and notorious safe-conduct of Sigismund--"The honorable Master John Hus
we have taken under the protection and guardianship of ourselves and of
the Holy Empire. We enjoin upon you to allow him to pass, to stop, to
remain and to return, freely and without any hindrance whatever; and you
will, as in duty bound, provide for him and for his, whenever it shall
be needed, secure and safe conduct, to the honor and dignity of our
Majesty." Dated at Speyer, October 18, 1414.
[Illustration: HOUSE WITH TABLET WHERE HUS LODGED AND THE SCHNETZ GATE.]
John XXIII with piratical pomposity promised the papal protection: "Even
if Hus had killed my own brother, he shall be safe in Constance."
With the Emperor Sigismund came twenty princes and one hundred and forty
counts. The Pope had been a pirate; at Bologna he had plundered and
oppressed his people and sold licenses to usurers, gamblers, and
prostitutes; his cruelty thinned the population; in the first year as
legate at Bologna he outraged two hundred maidens, wives, or widows,
and a multitude of nuns; at least so Catholic historians say.
With this holy father there came to the Council twenty-nine cardinals,
seven patriarchs, over three hundred bishops and archbishops, four
thousand priests, two hundred and fifty university professors, besides
Greeks and Turks, Armenians and Russians, Africans and Ethiopians, in
all from sixty to a hundred thousand strangers, and thirty thousand
horses.
In order to amuse these godly fathers amid their grave labors there
came seventeen hundred artists, dancers, actors, jugglers, musicians
and--prostitutes, seven hundred public ones, not counting the private
ones.
Hus wrote: "Would that you could see this Council, which is called most
holy and infallible; truly you would see great wickedness, so that I
have been told by Suabians that Constance could not in thirty years be
purged of the sins which the Council has committed in the city."
These men of sin, who kissed the toe of Pope John XXIII, a man of sin,
burned the saintly Hus; no wonder he likened them to the scarlet whore
of the Revelation. At one stage of the holy and infallible Council these
learned fathers used arguments that strike us as rather striking: a
cardinal assaulted an archbishop; a patriarch hit a protonotary; a
Spanish prelate hurled an Englishman into the mud; the English were
caught in arms to assault Pierre d'Ailly, the Cardinal of Cambray. As
members of the Church militant they were certainly fighting a good
fight.
Sigismund burnt Hus as a Wiclifite, the next year the Council called the
Emperor a Wiclifite and Hussite and heretic. Pope John XXIII condemned
Hus as a heretic, soon after he was a prisoner in the same prison with
Hus. Dramatic!
[Illustration: PIERRE D'AILLY]
John Gerson, the celebrated Chancellor of the great University of Paris
and "Doctor Christianissimus," and Pierre d'Ailly, the great Cardinal of
Cambray, accused Hus of heresy; later on themselves were accused of
heresy by the same Council. Gerson declared Hus had never been sentenced
had not an attorney been denied him, and himself would rather be tried
by Jews and infidels than before the commission. Such were the men
that were to try a man such as Hus.
As Paul preached in his own hired house under the very palace of Nero,
so Hus preached Christ to all who came to his humble house and with a
few friends maintained daily worship, close to the Pope's palace.
Greater than emperors and popes, princes and prelates from all Europe
that crowded Constance, was the humble Bohemian Hus; they are seen today
mainly in the light shed from his shining name.