Page:The Czechoslovak Review, vol3, 1919.djvu/378

and it found its expression above all in the University.

I would never advise sovereigns who desire to instruct their people in the cult of tradition to go for their model to Paris. The French people are revolutionary by temperament, by a natural instinct. Over against Germany, conservative, devoted to tradition, inert, incapable of getting by its own effort out of a given situation, France has the desire, the need of change, of progress, of movement, because it is a country which lives, which thinks, which searches, which is never content with what it has, which never believes to have arrived at its goal. And this restlessness of spirit, this search for perfection explains the immense attraction which it exercises over souls.

The masters, the students who returned to Prague after spending several years in Paris, brought with them, without a doubt, a revolutionary virus; professors under whom they sat taught them progressive nominalism, which had been introduced by William Occam. They had listened to startling appeals of Peter d’Ailly or Nicholas Clemengue.

For a quarter century a series of preachers and writers, Conrad Waldhauser, Milič, Štítný, Janov, many others, denounced the sins of the clergy and preached a return to Christianity more nearly resembling that of the apostles. They gathered around them quite a number of disciples, exalted piety, created a certain mystic enthusiasm. Such religious revivals were frequent in the Middle Ages, and the popes were not afraid of them. The movement did not acquire a real importance until it found support and center in the University. Its intervention resulted in lending the innovators an authority which they could have never gained otherwise. However remarkable may be the devotion and eloquence of an individual, if he remains isolated his influence is almost always impotent or fleeting. The University gave to the reformers a numerous and faithful audience, prone to enthusiasm, an audience which dispersed itself throughout the kingdom and spread the new doctrine; it gave them co-workers who cleared up their counsels, set aside their doubts and lent to their words something of the almost sacred character and weight which belonged to the University. It also gave to ecclesiastical disputes a more precise, more dogmatic character; it switched them over into the field of doctrine.

It is, in my opinion, one of the most remarkable achievements of Czech historical science to have shown that the great movement of reform which is summed up in the names of Hus and Jerome of Prague is the conclusion of a long collective effort on the part of the entire University. But in order to accomplish this work it was first needed that she should be freed from the domination of the German masters. The famous decree of Kutná Hora (January 18, 1409) made the University purely Czech; it transformed the Christian University into the National University; it made of the studium generale of Charles IV. a forum of Czech thought. It cannot be a matter of indifference to us that in this decree of 1409, which is one of the landmarks in the history of the Czech people, we are entitled to claim some share of credit. At the time King Václav IV. signed it he had before him an embassy of our King Charles VI. What the role of our envoys was we do not know exactly; but it is certain that at the instigation of Charles VI., King Václav labored at the restoration of Christian unity, broken by the great schism, and that the opposition of German masters induced him to take away from them the unfair privileges which they had enjoyed up to that time.

From this moment the reformers were in control of the University, and Hus found there the needed support.

The questions which were the subject of dispute among the professors of Prague, and which let loose furious passions, seem to us today trifling. We are all of us in France, more or less, disciples of Bayle and Voltaire, and we are inclined to look contemptuously on disputants who with the weapons of syllogisms quarrelled about distinctions which we cannot even perceive. Let us beware, nevertheless, of being deceived by terms. If we go to the bottom of things, we realize soon that the real questions at issue were essential principles on which modern society is founded.

At what moment did the struggle become more violent? When the Archbishop Zbyněk ordered the burning of Wycliffe’s books because he had condemned them as heretical. Hus and his friends refused to obey. To what motives did they appeal? First, that in order to learn what is in a book it is not very sensible to burn it; but