what, for want of space, must be a very short sketch of his career,[1] it will be well to mention one of the theories as to the origin of the Hussite movement. It is connected with the now uncontested fact that the struggle between the German and the Slav race was the principal cause of that movement.
It has been said by Bohemian writers since the seventeenth century, and it has recently been re-affirmed, especially by Russian historians, that the Hussite movement was not caused by a desire for Church reform, as were the other movements that subsequently took place in the Western world, but that it was rather a movement in favour of joining the Eastern Church; and that "Hus himself was of the orthodox Church (pravoslaw) in his views, his actions, and his endeavours."[2]
The Eastern origin of Christianity in Bohemia, the existence from remote times of the monastery of St. Prokop on the Sazava, which celebrated the services of the Church in the Slav language, the revival of the traditions of that monastery by the foundation of a Slavonic Benedictine convent by Charles IV, the fact that the celibacy of the clergy and the administration of the Communion to laymen in one kind only were introduced into Bohemia far later than into other lands subject to the Western Church, are the principal points in favour of this theory.
The positive statement of Palacký[3]—the standard authority on Bohemian history up to 1526—that in spite of all
- ↑ For a full account of the career of Hus, I must refer my readers to my Life and Times of Master John Hus.
- ↑ Professor Kalousek, in a very remarkable article on "Russian Researches on the Causes and Objects of the Hussite Movement," published in the Journal of the Bohemian Museum for 1882. The learned professor is strongly opposed to this theory, which it would perhaps be hardly necessary to notice were it not that its very general acceptation in Russia gives it a certain importance. In the article mentioned above, Professor Kalousek says (quoting from a recent Russian writer), that the theory of the Greek "orthodox" origin and tendency of the "Hussite movement has, in Russia, been introduced into the school-books as an uncontested fact; it is maintained by people otherwise of the most divergent opinions; we hear of it from theologians and publicists on the most varied occasions, at Hus's jubilee, and at the foundation of the Greek Church at Prague, at the Slav Congress at Moscow (1867), and on the occasion of the Old-Catholic movement in Germany; everywhere they remind us of the 'orthodox' tendencies of the Bohemians."
- ↑ Palacký, Böhmische Geschichte, vol. iii. bk. vi. chap. iii.
