The first is that Huss, as also Wyclif before him, continued to call the church mother and holy mother. Although this designation has the prestige of high antiquity, it is to be used with great caution. The church is not a personality, giving birth to spiritual children. The designation is drawn from Paul's placing Christ and the church figuratively in the relation of bridegroom and bride. But nowhere in the New Testament is the church called mother or bringing forth ascribed to it. The term is bound up with the conception of the church as a saving institution and its use developed with the development of the sacramental system. From the Protestant standpoint it is fallacious. Wyclif and Huss, again and again, pronounce it a metaphor and so prepared the way for its rejection by the Reformers.[1]
Another remark is that Huss makes not a little of church history. He had the historical sense and less of the scholastic than we might expect. The age of criticism was dawning not only among the men of the Renaissance but in the church. It is interesting to compare Luther's conception of the use of history to do away with bad usages. In his Introduction to Dr. Barnes's History of the Lives of the Popes, issued in 1536, he said that, in the beginning, not being much versed in the lives of the popes, he attacked the papacy a priori, that is, from holy Scripture, but was wonderfully delighted that others were doing the same a posteriori, that is, from history.[2] Huss used history to prove the truth of Scripture.
A third remark is that nowhere in this treatise does Huss use the passage, John 17, "that they may be one as thou,
- ↑ In his Super IV. Sent., p. 469, Huss speaks of the church as our most dear mother, the most worthy mother of predestination, etc. In his Com. on the Decalogue, Flajshans's ed., p. 19, he says of the fifth commandment: By some "thy spiritual father" is said to be the priest and truly "thy mother" is the church. He then went on to speak of another interpretation by which the Christian has three mothers, a mother after the flesh, a spiritual mother, the church, and a celestial mother, Mary. Cyprian presented the mediæval view when he said: "He cannot have God for his father who does not have the church for his mother." Schaff, Ch. Hist., II, 173.
- ↑ See Jacobs, Lutheranism in England, p. 182.
