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