nt of an age than
a brilliant mark,--rather a type than a great, restless, creative power.
His life was almost too saintly to be interesting in the popular sense;
and although he does emerge above his age, yet it is not as the advocate
of an idea, as Luther was, nor of a great system, as Calvin was, nor as
a man fearless of kings and queens, as Knox was; his life, rather, was a
continued protest against sin in the high places of the Church. Though
in him there appear glimpses of a clearer doctrine than that of his age,
yet they do not come to a full expression; it is the pride of pontiffs,
the debaucheries of priests, the grasp after place and power and wealth
by those who claim to follow the meek and holy One, which provoke his
fiercest invective.

Mr. Gillett has, therefore, done a good service in subordinating the
story of John Huss to the history of his age. His work is strictly
entitled, "The Bohemian Reformation of the Fifteenth Century." That
period has heretofore been almost a blank in our ecclesiastical records.
The blank is now filled. It was a period of great beginnings. Germany
was silent then; but Wycliffe in England, and Huss, with his
predecessors, Waldhauser, Milicz, and Peter of Dresden, in Bohemia,
were even then causing the Papal power, rent as it was with its internal
dissensions, to tremble as before approaching death.

The story of that impotent rage which sought to purchase life and safety
for the Romish Church by the murder of Huss and of Jerome of Prague is
instructive, if it is not pleasing. The truth was too true to be spoken.
Never has the Church of Rome, in its inquisitorial madness, been so
blinded with fury and passion as then. Weakened by internal feuds, with
two Popes struggling and hurling anathemas at each other, and with a
priesthood at its lowest point, not of ignorance, but of carnality, it
seemed in peril of utter extinction. Its own boldest and ablest men were
among its most outspoken accusers; and no words stronger or more cutting
were spoken by Huss than by Gerson and Clemangis. But Huss committed the
common mistake of reformers. He put himself outside of the body to be
reformed. He allowed his spirit to fret against the evils of his times
so madly that he would fain have put himself outside of the
circumstances of his age. This wiser men than he, men no loss ardent,
but more calculating, never would do. In the city of Constance itself,
during the sittings of the great Council