conduct never had this meaning, therefore no question could have been raised about a breach of it thereby; but they never could forget, that instead of acting as an intercessor for Huss, he had rather egged on the fathers to condemn him."

tears:

"Lord John! be assured that if I knew that I had written or preached against the law and Holy Mother Church aught that is erroneous, I would humbly recant it, God is my witness; but I always desire that they should point out to me better and more probable passages of Scripture (Scriptura) than are the things that I have written and taught, and if these are pointed out to me, I will most readily recant."

At which one of the bishops present answered: " Magister John, wilt thou be wiser than the whole Council?" But the

magister said to him: "I do not wish to be wiser than the whole Council; but give me, I ask, the least in the Council, who will instruct me with better and stronger passages of Scripture, and I am ready to recant forthwith." Thus, it would appear, that it was the Protestant principles of private judgment, as against mere authority, and of appeal to the Scriptures, as against the living exponents of Church doctrines, for which Huss was condemned and suffered, and not for any deliberate or intentional variation of doctrine from

what he supposed to be the teaching of the Church in his day.

But in his correspondence and intercourse with the nameless "father," and subsequently, another, and that a very singular element, appears to play a very important part, which requires the more attention from us, as Palacky has passed it over in silence in his history. It was not merely doctrines which he held that Huss was required to recant, but doctrines which he maintained to have been falsely ascribed to him. The formula of recanta

tion which the "father" urged upon him was as follows:†

"Documenta," p. 316. + P. 121.

great stress on the sin which he thought he would commit if he were to recant what he had never held.

"This is," says he, " my final determination in the name of Jesus Christ: that I will not admit the articles, which have been truly extracted, to be erroneous; neither will I abjure the articles laid to my charge by false witnesses; because to abjure is to confess that one has held an error or errors, and to depart from them and hold the contrary. Because God knoweth that I have never preached those errors which they have concocted, removing many truths and adding falsehoods."

So that the submission to authority required of him was not merely the accept

ance of the wisdom of others in lieu of

his own, but also something that would have completely annihilated his moral betrue and honest man, indignantly revolted. ing, and from which his moral sense, as a Indeed, after the conversation with Sigismund above related, the leading members of the Council seem to have felt that they must of necessity either crush or burn him.

Passing over, for want of space, the interesting particulars of his degradation from the priesthood, and the other preliminaries to his execution, we will give the account of his last moments in the

words of Baron Helfert:
:-

"When they arrived at the place they arranged themselves in a wide circle, and orders were given to Ulric of Reichenthal to ask Huss whether he wished to confess; and a priest named Ulric Sorand came forwards and said: Dear sir and magister, if you will leave your unbelief and heresy, for which you must suffer, I will gladly hear your confession: if, however,

6

you will not, you know yourself that it is not proper to give divine things to or perform them for a heretic." To this Huss replied, that, not being conscious of mortal sin, he had no need of his assistance. He wished to address the

people, but the Count Palatine prevented it, and bade the executicners commence their work. They placed him at the stake with his face towards the east; but when one of those present observed it, he was obliged to remove to the opposite side with his face towards the west. Now he stood fastened to the stake with chains and iron bands, surrounded up to his neck by faggots, mixed with straw and smeared with pitch; and now the dreadful act was about to begin, when the Lord of Pappenheim, the marshal of the empire, sent by the king, suddenly arrived, and entreated him to save his life and soul by recantation. But Huss replied that he was willing to die a cheerful death for the truth, which he had taught in his lifetime. Then both noblemen gave the signal by clapping their hands, and turned away. In a moment the pile was in a blaze of fire; flame and smoke soon stifled his voice, as he gazed towards heaven, as some imagined they heard, singing psalms, as others relate, screaming with agony, THE MAR

TYR OF ERROR AND DISOBEDIENCE."'*

Such is the account of Huss's last moments and the causes of his death, which the Ultramontanes would wish to have accepted by the world; the change of type in which is Baron Helfert's, not ours. Such is the view of his fate, which was intended to counteract the effect produced by the history of Palacky, which, however, itself appears to us to have done Huss but scanty justice, and to reflect the impression conveyed by his Latin rather than by his Bohemian works, most of which were then unprinted and unknown, except to a few. But their subsequent publication by Pan K. J. Erben produced an effect in Bohemia, the results of which have not yet fully appeared. So great was the sensation produced by the impossibility of finding adequate ground for the condemnation and execution of Huss in his Bohemian writings, that it was actually in contemplation to collect signatures for a petition to the so-called Ecumenical Council, requesting it to review the case of Huss, and possibly to reverse the decision of the Council of Constance, and rehabilitate him as a good and faithful Catholic. But the national press gave so unfavourable a reception to the proposal that it was soon abandoned. The words of the Narodni Listz ("National Letters"), a national, but not a Protestant, paper, on July 4th, 1869, upon the subject are so remarkable, both in themselves and as expressing the general feeling of the enlightened portion of the Bohemian or Czeskish nation, that

"Mucennika bludu a neposlusentsoi."- N.B. Mladenovitz gives the very words which he chanted firstly, secondly, and thirdly." Documenta," p.

823.

we cannot but think that we shall do good service by placing them permanently on record.

Listz, "in one of the local papers, that an "We have just read," says the Narodni idea has started up in Prague to frame and proMoravians as possible to a petition to the comcure as many signatures of Bohemians and ing Ecumenical Council, to undertake a revision of the case of Huss.

"With this idea it is impossible for us to agree, either from the standpoint of the historical traditions of our nation, or from that of modern relations; we hold it therefore to be our duty to pronounce publicly against it, although we certainly doubt whether the wish for the revision just mentioned can have come from the public itself, and can have found adherents in wider circles. What would be the necessary consequences of such a petition, not to say of an should thrust anew into public discussion a long actual revision? Certainly only this: that we ago completed act of the great tragedy of our nation; that we should again transfer an event, which has now only a historical and literary significance for our nation, to the ground of religious disputes, which our age has happily done with, and for which our nation cannot entertain any longing, especially at a time when a matter much more important to us is in question national existence of the Slavonic race in the -the preservation of the political and lands of the Bohemian crown. On this political struggle we must for the time concentrate all our powers. Is it that some of us have a wish for arguments with the hierarchy at the Romish Council on the questions, Whether a man is predestinated to or foreknown for salvation?'

·

Huss to the stake are dead, and that no procurator at the present Ecumenical Council will be affected by their passions. What! do we not observe how even now the representatives of the Fathers at Constance skirmish against the doctrines of the pious Magister of Husinetz? Do we not see how they fill the columns of their papers with fresh and fresh anathemas against the Martyr of Constance? Can we hope from these gentleman, that, devoid of passion, they will finally acknowledge that, up to this time, they have been condemning an innocent man?

The projected revision would not therefore be convenient to anybody; nay, it would not be advantageous for our own nation. The Bohemian nation stands no more in need of any such revision. The idea of reform, which it took up as a foster-mother out of the flames of Constance, and suckled with its own blood till the great reformation of the whole Christian world, has long had its character cleared and been recognized, not only by the whole of the present enlightened world, but also by history, which exercises jurisdiction, as a supreme judge, even over Popes and Ecclesiastical Councils. What would there be to reconsider? Perhaps the truth of some of those humble principles which Huss defended before the Council of Constance.

Those principles were only the first germ, the seed from which through the intellectual activity of the whole nation, during two centuries -as even the German historian, Ranke, acknowledges in his latest work the whole of the great Reformation of the seventeenth aud eighteenth centuries sprang and developed itself. That Reformation means not merely reform in the Christian Church, it means also the progress of mankind in the path of enlightenment and freedom in general. Our nation, in becoming the fosterer of the modest doctrine of Huss, became also the foremost combatant in the path of human progress. Do you wish by a revision, which would be limited merely to the Council of Constance, to depreciate the significance of the whole of Hussitism? Do you wish to annihilate that gigantic labour of great wars, that lasted two centuries, by means of the retraction of a few articles of the accusation preferred at Constance, which are insignificant in themselves, and can affect nobody any longer?

Neither do we recognize the need of any revision even from a purely formal standpoint. Indeed, our nation has already itself revised the proceedings at Constance. It revised them in good earnest on the helmets of the crusaders in the victories at Domazlitz, Ouste, Tachor, Sudomer, and elsewhere. By the power of its arms and the irresistible might of its truth, it induced even the Ecclesiastical Council of Basle to repeal the sentence of that of Constance. Go to the Museum of the Bohemian Kingdom, and read for yourselves in golden letters the humble recantation of the fiery decision of the Fathers of Constance! See there the Compactata,' in which an Ecclesiastical Council not merely acknowledged the truth of the doctrine of Magis

6

ter John Huss, but, more than that, acknowledged the rectitude also of the later and much more advanced Hussite Reformation, by declaring the successors of Huss good Christians, and especial sons of the Holy Church!'

"Do you wish to entreat pardon for your great Reformer from a Council of Bishops and Patriarchs, who, in the nineteenth century, are going to meet for the purpose of condemning enlightenment in general and of proclaiming the infallibility of the Pope as a new article of faith?

"You wish to clear the character of Huss, and see! by your projected petition for the revision of the proceedings against him in a new Council of Bishops, you are yourselves violating a chief article of his doctrine. Magister John Huss, indeed, laid the greatest stress on this truth, which he first enunciated in the chapel Bethlehem, that the Church is the assembly of all believers, and that to that assembly alone it appertains to decide infallibly about articles of faith. But you wish to betake yourselves to an assembly of obscure ecclesiastical dignitaries, ascribing to them the right of deciding matters which appertain to the judgment of the whole Church.

"We should therefore find ourselves, after four centuries and a half, just in the position of those who burned him at Constance. And that is not enough. A formerly victorious and heroic nation you want to make all at once into humble servants of the Romish hierarchy; you want the Bohemian nation, which for whole centuries was the only one in Europe that did not bend its neck beneath the sway of ambitious Rome, and which mest steadfastly opposed her, all at once, in a time of enlightenment and universal emancipation from hierarchial rule, to surrender itself to the mercy of Ultramontanism, to disown its past history and to ask for absolution for the errors of its predecessors. We are to exchange our mighty past for the contempt of all enlightened people of the age in which we are living!

"After having hitherto drawn our great strength in the struggle for the independent existence of our nation from the glorious times of the Bohemian Reformation, we are all at once to annihilate its significance! The great Bohemian Reformation is to be crumpled up into a few insignificant articles of the defence of Huss at Constance, and the great Reformer is to be made into an obscure, insignificant priestly zealot, who was condemned only from personal feeling,' and is now to be accepted to mercy, as a pious member of the Romish hierarchy!

"Do but leave that curse of the Council of Constance on the heads of those who burnt him and on the heads of their present representatives. A great Reformer condemned by an assembly of bishops and prelates has much greater significance in the history of human enlightenment than a priest accepted to mercy by the selfsame Romish hierarchy."

A. H. WRATISLAW.

From The Spectator. TWO ASPECTS OF THE LIFE OF A JESUIT PRIEST.

66

UNDER the somewhat ill-chosen title of "The Condition of Catholics under James I.," Mr. Morris has translated from the Latin an autobiography of John Gerard, the celebrated Jesuit father of the reigns of Elizabeth and James I., and has published for the first time that father's "History of the Gunpowder Plot," composed by him after his recall from England consequent on the increased danger of his position in this country from his supposed complicity in the Plot. The History was consulted in MS. by Dr. Lingard in preparing his History of England, and consequently the new facts of importance contained in it have already been placed before the English public, and have been duly estimated in all recent considerations of the subject of the Plot. But both Autobiography" and "History" possess a value of their own which is perfectly unaffected by any use which may have been made of them as authorities for facts. Nothing but the actual words of such a writer, and his narrative taken in extenso, could give any real idea of the strange and dangerous times in which he lived, or make us feel what was the nature of the man himself, and what was the true character of the principles by which his conduct was dictated. In the case before us such a delineation was especially needed, for the name of "Jesuit" has long been a term of reproach, not merely among Protestants, but also among decided Roman Catholics, and the question of the compatibility of the maxims of the Society with civil government and social morality has been one on which liberal-minded men have been much divided in opinion. And although we cannot unreservedly accept the account given of himself and the representation of public affairs by Father John Gerard, it is quite impossible for the most guarded of autobiographers and historians to enter into such details of every-day life without unintentionally employing expressions and displaying sentiments which tell something very like the truth about himself and his position. It it also a satisfaction to anyone who wishes to ascertain the truth, that such works have been edited in the present instance by a gentleman belonging to the Society, and who sympathizes so much

The Condition of Catholics under James I. Father Gerard's Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot. Edited, with his Life, by John Morris. Priest of the Society of Jesus. London: Longmans and Co.

1871.

with the sentiments and morale of Gerard that his occasional notes and comments are rather explanations and defences than extenuations of his author on most questionable points. We therefore run no risk in assuming that the sentiments implied in these statements of Father Gerard convey the true rationale of morality in the Society of Jesus. It may be differently formulated in different ages, and to meet differing phases of society, but substantially and in spirit Father Gerard's exposition may be taken as authoritative.

The leading events of John Gerard's life may be compressed within a comparatively small compass. He was the second son of Sir Thomas Gerard, of Bryn, in Lancashire, a gentleman of ancient family, and a determined Recusant Roman Catholic, who was twice imprisoned in the Tower for plots against the Government. He was born in 1564, and at the age of fifteen was sent to Exeter College, Oxford, but only stayed there a year, having refused to attend Protestant worship and partake of the Anglican Sacrament. On leaving he was placed under the tuition of his old college tutor, who had left also on similar religious grounds, and of a priest who resided on that pretext in the Gerard household, and who afterwards entered the Society of Jesus. At nineteen he went over to France, and resided for three years at Rheims. Here he began to devote himself especially to the study of theology, but he says that he was left too much to the guidance of his own taste in the choice of his reading. About this time he made the acquaintance of a young man who had just entered the Society, and it was under his influence, no doubt, that, to use his words," when about twenty years of age, I heard the call of God's infinite mercy and loving kindness, inviting me from the crooked ways of the world to the straight path, to the perfect following of Christ in his holy Society." After three years spent at Rheims, Gerard went to Clermont College at Paris, to finish his general education, and “to see more closely the manner of the Society's life." A year afterwards he had a dangerous illness, and on his recovery" accompanied Father Thomas Darbyshire to Rouen, in order to see Father Persons, who had arrived thither from England, and was staying incognito in that city, superintending the publication of his Christian Directory." Him Gerard consulted on his vocation, and by his advice resolved to visit England first. During this visit he experienced his first imprisonment, but escaped with a fine,

and got off to Paris, from which city he repaired to Rome. Here he studied at the English College before entering the Society, but the air of Rome not suiting his constitution, his studies were hurried, and at the time when the Spanish Armada was nearing the coasts of England, " Cardinal Allen," he says, "thought fit to send me to England for various matters connected with Catholic interests, but as I still wanted several months of the lawful age for taking Priest's Orders, a Papal dispensation was obtained. I was most unwilling to depart unless I was first admitted into the Society, so Father Persons, out of his singular charity towards me, obtained my admission to the Noviciate, which I was to finish in England." So on the Feast of the Assumption 1588, he and Father Edmund Ouldcorne, who afterwards suffered for alleged complicity in the Gunpowder Plot, were admitted into the Society, and commissioned for England. They, after some delays, embarked accordingly, and landed on the coast of Norfolk, from which county, after several adventures involving a successful initiation of Gerard into his missionary labours, they both found their way to London, and were welcomed by the acting head of the Society in England, the celebrated Father Garnet.

From this time until the apprehension of Gerard in 1594, his life was a succession of zealous labours, under various assumed names, in what he considered to be the path of duty, and of hair-breadth escapes from the priest-searchers, and of similar adventures, which read like a romance, and form an interesting illustration of the priests' hiding-houses which still remain in this country. How far during this time he was engaged in other than missionary enterprises, in the strictly religious sense of the term, we cannot tell. He, indeed, always affirms that the principles of his Society prohibit any interference in State affairs, but the interests of their religion appear always to have been considered a fair object of concern, and this proviso we know was elastic enough to allow Father Persons to be the acknowledged head of the party in favour of the Spanish Succession during the reign of Elizabeth and the beginning of that of James I. Besides, in fact, Jesuits, according to their own acknowledgment, were several times engaged in missions of a very mixed character, and it must remain very doubtful whether the favourite pupil of Persons, whom he despatched into England at such an era as the Spanish invasion, confined himself to what we should call religious

labours. The English Government knowing his antecedents and connections, was naiurally of opinion that he had other objects in view, and meddled in other affairs, so after being transferred to one or two prisons, he was at last committed to the Tower, where he was put to the torture, to extract from him the whereabouts of Father Garnet. He, however, remained unshaken, and the attempt to force him seems to have been abandoned by the Government, the Earl of Essex expressing great admiration at his constancy. The humane conduct of the officials of the Tower affords a pleasing contrast to the cruel system of which such men as Cecil, Bacon, and Coke made themselves the agents, indeed, in the case of Gerard, his gaoler appears to have carried his leniency to the extent of great negligence of his duties as custodian; and availing himself of this little by little, the clever Jesuit father held free communication with his friends without, and by their assistance and the co-operation of a fellow-prisoner, managed to effect a daring and adventurous escape from the Tower on the night of October 4, 1597. He resumed his missionary efforts, the Government making little effort to recapture him at first; but when the Gunpowder Plot exploded, he became involved in the charges made against the Jesuit Fathers, and a more diligent search was made for him, until at last he was smuggled out of Eugland in May, 1606. Three years later he was admitted into the body of the Society by the four solemn vows of a professed Father, by special grace, as his learning did not come up to the standard required by the Society. He survived his escape from England thirty-one years, but his autobiography ends here, and we have scarcely any record of the rest of his life. He died as confessor to the English College at Rome, July 27, 1637 in the seventyfourth year of his age.

Such is an outline of the life which this volume discloses to us in detail, and we must confess we have risen from its perusal with a mixed feeling of admiration for the individual Jesuits, and of grave disapproval of the system under the guidance of which they acted. Under a different system, and in another sphere of action, John Gerard might have achieved a reputation which would entitle him to rank among our noblest English worthies. A member of one of the old landed families of this country, conversant with the ordinary accomplishments of such a station, courteous and affable, with an unusually