Page:Adventures of Baron Wenceslas Wratislaw of Mitrowitz (1862).djvu/50

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INTRODUCTION.

the enlightenment that, by God’s grace, enabled Hus and Jerome to give their bodies to be burned at Constance? The little fame which arose, in 1781, out of the long and cruelly smothered embers of the torch thus transmitted from England to Bohemia, is now becoming larger and larger, and brighter and brighter, and promises to burst into a sunbright splendour of religious enlightenment, if not neglected by those who ought to interest themselves in it. And the rapidity with which constitutions have been solemnly promulgated and as solemnly revoked, with which concessions have been made on paper and annulled with a stroke of the pen in Austria, must surely show the absolute necessity of immediately realizing and consolidating everything that has been granted. It would seem as if it were now or never. Will England resume her ancient work of aid and enlightenment in favour of these long oppressed, but now liberated, zealous and deserving fellow-Protestants?