John Hus, or of Husinec, was born at the village of that name about the year 1369. The 6th of July was traditionally believed to be the day of his birth, and as it was also the day of his death, the day was always celebrated in the Bohemian Church up to the time when the battle of the White Mountain re-established the Church of Rome in Bohemia. He arrived at Prague at a very early age, and in September 1393 took the degree of Bachelor of Arts at the University there. In the following year he became a Bachelor of Divinity, and in 1396 Master of Arts. His reputation for great learning spread very rapidly at the University. In 1401 he became Dean of the Faculty of Arts, and in the following year, at an unusually early age, for the first time Rector of the University. But it was only from the time that he began preaching in the Bethlehem Chapel that his name became widely known to those also who were not connected with the University.
The Bethlehem Chapel, situated in what is still known as the Bethlehem Place—‘Betlemské Námesti’—was founded in 1391 by John of Milheim, one of King Wenceslas’s courtiers, together with ‘Kriz the Shopkeeper,’ as he is called in the contemporary records, a wealthy tradesman of Prague.
Following the example of Milic, whose foundation had been called ‘Jerusalem,’ Milheim and Kriz also gave a Biblical name to the new chapel. Both founders were favourable to Church reform and partisans of the national movement. Sermons were always preached in Bohemian at Bethlehem, and the brilliant eloquence of Hus, of which we can still judge, as some of his sermons have been preserved, attracted the general attention of the people of Prague. It is noteworthy that during the first years of his priesthood—he was consecrated as a priest about the year 1400—Hus was on good terms with his ecclesiastical superiors. Even after the first disputes concerning Wycliffe’s teaching had arisen, Hus was, as he himself mentions, requested by the newly appointed Archbishop of Prague ‘to bring all irregularities contrary to the rules of the Church’ to the Archbishop’s notice. It should here already be mentioned that the teaching of Hus differed from that of Rome far less than was the case with most Church Reformers. As Dr. Harnack has written,[10] Hus, like Wycliffe, ‘only denied the alleged right of the clergy to represent the Church and administer its sacraments even when they did not fulfil God’s commandments. How—he declared—can the functions of priests be valid if the presupposition of all they do in the Church and for the Church, namely, obedience to the law of God, is absent. The quintessence of that law is the Sermon of the Mount and the example of the humble life of Jesus; yet the whole of Scripture is the law of God.’
The first disputes between Hus and his ecclesiastical superiors broke out in 1403. On May 28th of that year a full meeting of the members of the University, memorable as the beginning of the Hussite struggle, took place at the Carolinum. It was finally decided that forty-five so-called ‘articles’ culled from the writings of Wycliffe, twenty-four of which had already been condemned by the Council of Blackfriars, should be declared heretical, and that all members of the University should be forbidden to circulate them. Hus and his friends, who were accused of spreading the heretical opinions of Wycliffe in Bohemia, protested against this sentence and maintained that the ‘articles’ contained many statements that were not to be found in Wycliffe’s writings.
Shortly after this first debate, Zbynek Zajic of Hasenburg became Archbishop of Prague, and it seemed for a time that religious peace had returned to the country. But in 1408 the clergy of Prague and of the whole archbishopric of Prague brought forward a protest against Hus’s preaching at the Bethlehem Chapel,