Churches—the Hussite Church and the Bohemian Brotherhood—were utterly destroyed. The Hapsburgs, encouraged and helped by the Roman Church, carried through the Catholicizing process with fire and sword, by confiscation and banishment. There is no other instance of the overwhelming majority of a Christian nation having had its religion thus changed. In France, Italy and Spain, where the Reformation was likewise violently suppressed, it had affected only a minority. In those countries, moreover, the Counter-Reformation was carried out by their own people, whereas, in our case, it was the work of an alien dynasty, hostile to us and to our spiritual traditions. In the light of these facts, every enlightened and educated Czech is bound to ask what this violent Catholicizing signified if, as Palacký held, our Reformation and the Bohemian Brotherhood marked the highest point of our history. How is the comparatively rapid reversion to an older religious and ecclesiastical form to be explained ? Does violence suffice to explain it or did the fault lie in the Reformation itself? If so, what was it ? Does the success of the Hapsburgs in forcing Catholicism upon us reveal some failing in our national character, some lack of endurance, of steadfastness, of political capacity? What meaning are we to ascribe to our Protestantism, in which—according to the Emperor Joseph’s Edict of Toleration—Hussitism and the Bohemian Brotherhood, that is to say, Palacký’s perfect Church, were preserved in the guise of Lutheranism and Calvinism? If, as I hold, Palacký’s philosophy of our history is essentially true, the cleft between Church and culture has, in our case, peculiar national importance, an importance not solely philosophical and religious as in the cases of other nations; it means that our Reformed Church was suppressed by an alien dynasty with the assent of the Catholic Church, and that the Hapsburg Counter-Reformation yawns as an abyss between the Reformation period and the present day.
No Czech historian can escape the problem of the Counter-Reformation. From the very beginning of the national reawakening the memory of our Reformation revived and stimulated intellectual freedom. The names of Hus, Žižka, Comenius and afterwards of Chelčický, became dear to all. Controversy began upon the meaning of the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation and the religious question generally. Palacký—with whom I do not agree on this point—looked upon the division of the Church into Catholicism and Protestantism as a result of historical theological evolution. He
