Czechoslovak Church is Hussite. It is natural, too, that these Churches should seek contact with the foreign Churches to which they are most akin. The Czechoslovak Church is related to the Anglicans and the Old Catholics. It has, too, a certain kinship with the Polish Mariavites and, in some respects, with Orthodoxy. The Orthodox movement is in touch with the Greek and Serbian Patriarchs. Orthodox, too, are our neighbours in Roumania and Russia. These varieties of ecclesiastical allegiance obviously strengthen the principle of religious toleration, a principle that sprang from the Reformation, though it was by no means immediately observed in the Reformation itself. On the authority of Augustine and of Thomas Aquinas the lives of heretics were forfeit in the Medieval Church—a barbaric doctrine that took time to overcome, as is proved by the case of Servetus, whom Calvin had burned at the stake in 1558. So gradually, indeed, did the spirit of toleration develop that Locke, who was one of its strongest advocates, would not tolerate atheism. Not until the French Revolution was the full right to freedom of conscience codified and practised in the religious field, but even then by no means in the field of politics.
In our Democratic Republic, freedom of conscience and toleration must not merely be codified but realized in every domain of public life. Palacký’s philosophical interpretation of our history esteems the Bohemian Brotherhood as its consummation. The Father of our Nation and our historical past alike enjoin upon us pure Christianity, the teaching of Jesus and His law of life. Democracy is the political form of the humane ideal.
