Brotherhood Church was especially significant, inasmuch as it surpassed in moral worth all the other Churches and the earlier attempts at religious reform. The Bohemian Brethren rejected the use of all force by State or Church, so well did it understand the intimate connexion between Church and State which was the essence of medieval theocracy. Chelčický’s extreme view was mitigated by his successors, as was the evanescent Communism of the Taborites; and though King George opposed the Brotherhood, he proclaimed the ideal of universal peace and was thus in agreement with the Brethren’s fundamental doctrine. Comenius, the last Bishop of the Brotherhood Church, built up his conception of humanity upon education and the school, and sought by means of them to carry out his national and pan-human programme. He still speaks to us through Leibnitz and Herder whose influence upon Dobrovský and Kollár Professor Denis has finely demonstrated; and their successors, Palacký, Šafařík and Havlíček likewise expressed the needs of their time in accordance with our national ideal of humanity.
In resisting the absolutism of an Austria inspired by the Counter-Reformation, we were the more disposed during the eighteenth century to welcome the “Era of Enlightenment” and the French Revolution because Rousseau, the intellectual leader of the Revolution, who had been brought up in Swiss Calvinism and Republicanism, took the ideas of the Reformation as his starting-point. Thus the thought of the West inspired our national rebirth. As Marx has justly observed, the men of the French Revolution trod the path which the Reformation had marked out. The “Era of Enlightenment,” the doctrine of humanity and the guiding principles of the eighteenth century are a sequel to the Lutheran and Calvinist Reformation and to our own Hussite reform. I do not claim that the humane ideal is specifically Czech. Nor do I assert that we Czechs and Slovaks are endowed by nature with a particularly gentle, tender, dove-like disposition. On the contrary, I think we are pretty hard, notwithstanding a peculiar receptive softness in our temperament that is not identical with kindliness or warmth of feeling. The humane ideal is pan-human and each people seeks to apply it in its own way. The English expression of it is mainly ethical; the French, political (by the proclamation of the Rights of Man); the German, social, or Socialist; and our own, national and religious. To-day it is universal, and the time is coming when all civilized peoples will recognize it as the foundation of the State and of international relationships.
