Letters of John Huss, Written During His Exile and Imprisonment

Towards the end of the fourteenth century there was born in Bohemia, a man whose name is inseparably connected with one of the most important revolutions of modern Europe. His history I have narrated in a preceding work. I there placed before my readers the great events of that memorable epoch, and exhibited on the stormy stage of the world this Christian, whose death, even more than his life, agitated his country and all Germany. My object, in the present work, is to complete the first,--to finish the portrait of the illustrious reformer of Bohemia, by making him also known in his domestic life--the effusions of his private intercourse. The man is completely revealed in his correspondence; and I here publish all that the friends of Huss have handed down to us.

These Letters, which are translated now for the first time into our tongue, were never intended for the public eye, having been addressed by Huss to his disciples and friends, to be perused far from the view of his enemies, and under the shade of the domestic roof. They furnish most precious documents to history, and are unquestionable testimonies of the spirit and character of their author. Though they are not remarkable either for profundity of thought, or for style and singularity of doctrine, there, nevertheless, exhales an innocent candour and an angelic piety, like a fragrant perfume, from every page. What especially pervades them, are the Christian thoughts on the fall of man, and his regeneration through Jesus Christ;--the conviction that all the things of this world pass away, and are but the shadows of things eternal;--that man is nothing without God;--that there is nothing but darkness or false lights wherever the divine flame does not penetrate;--and, lastly, above all these thoughts, subsists that which embraces all the rest--that “+Faith is life+.” We behold in his correspondence, a soul superior to seduction as well as to terror; a firm and upright reason which penetrates every subtilty; originates in the conscience alone; clings tenaciously to what appears to it to be the truth as to man’s most precious possession, as to the treasure which has nothing to fear, neither from rust nor robber. (Matt. vi. 20.)

Huss was one of those spirits, more contemplative than practical, which, after having recognised an idea as true, admit of no medium or arrangement in propagating it, and concern…