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heir priests' apparel, holding that this need not trouble them more than a little, since they are striving for something more weighty--the freedom of conscience. In this, as they say, they are carrying on the doctrines of Huss, which were so bloodily repressed by the dominant party. Under Charles IV. the Roman Catholic Church possessed about one-third of all the land in Bohemia, while in Prague alone there were some three thousand priests. And if the doctrines of Huss had not sunk deeply into the minds of the Bohemians this new Church would have found her task very much more difficult. The first three bishops were ordained last year by the Serbian Bishop of Ni[vs]. It was at one time thought that the Orthodox religion would be adopted, but this was found to be impossible, and after a year of negotiations it was settled that the Serbian Church should be regarded as a sister Church. The significance of Czecho-Slovakia's new Church is to be found in the national idea. So much is it a thing of the people and not of the priests that several schoolmasters have had to be ordained, the clergy being otherwise too scanty. In June 1919 a delegation from 3000 dissatisfied priests went to Rome. The Pope rejected what he called their foolish novelties. In January 1920 a secret meeting of 200 priests was held in Prague and 144 of them declared themselves for a new national Church. But few of them possessed the necessary resolution, such as was displayed by Dr. Farsky, a very intelligent and earnest young man who was Professor of Religion in the University and has now been appointed the Head of this new Church, as Bishop of Prague and Patriarch. His opponent, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Prague, has the reputation of being one of the cleverest of Czech politicians, and it will be interesting to see how the position develops. Since the War the Roman Catholic Church has lost 25 per cent. of its members--during the War it was, in the opinion of many, though perhaps it had no option, very much the servant of the Habsburgs. And one imagines that the Archbishop is handicapped by the demands of his party that the State should unquestionably continue to pay the yearly interests of the large number of monasteries that were dissolved more than a century ago by Joseph II. "All England's troubles," said the Coadjutor-Archbishop to me, "emanate from the fact that she nowadays pays nothing to the Church for those monasteries that were suppress
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