hand, he did not adopt Wyclif's doctrine of the eucharist but to the end insisted that he was wrongly charged with denying the church's dogma of transubstantiation.
V. Importance. Huss's treatise has a place of first importance among works on the church. Its treatment is clear, elaborate and professedly based on Scripture. It is the best known work on the subject issued from Augustine to the Reformation period. It was the basis of charges in the most famous formal trial of a single individual in the history of the Christian church.[1] It was cherished and used by a large section of the Bohemian people. It has had a permanent influence upon the development of the idea of the church.
Upon the council assembled at Constance Huss's volume made a deep impression as a work calculated to be disastrous in its effects, unless counteracted by the severest measures within the church's reach. One of its foremost leaders, that eminent man Cardinal d'Ailly, who had probably more to do than any other man of the council with Huss, declared that by an abundance of proofs Huss's treatise combated the plenary authority of the church as much as the Koran combats Christ.[2]
Wyclif's Treatise on the Church was hidden away in manuscript until a generation ago. His followers at Oxford, soon after his death, repudiated his views. His name was a memory except as his English version of the Bible was read in narrowing groups of Lollards. That memory, indeed, was powerful, for the early Protestant Reformers looked back to him and Tyndale wrote: "They said it in Wyclif's day and the hypocrites say it now, that God's Word arouseth in-
- ↑ I do not forget the trials of Abælard, Savonarola, etc. Arius's views, rather than Arius himself, were on trial at the council of Nice, though Arius became personally involved, being restored, however, after he had been banished and his books burned. Of course, Savonarola's trial lacked the imposing element involved in the trial of Huss, an œcumenical council.
- ↑ Du Pin, Works of Gerson, 2: 901.
