John Huss and the Hussite Wars - James Aitken Wylie

persons. Accordingly, when the deputies appeared
before the Council, they made the Fathers aware
that their deliberations must be confined to these
four points; that these were the faith of the
Bohemian nation; that that nation had not
empowered them to entertain the question of a
renunciation of that faith, but only to ascertain how
far it might be possible, in conformity with the four
articles specified, to arrange a basis of peace with
the Church of Rome, and permit a Roman Catholic
sovereign to wear the crown of Bohemia, and that
they had appeared in the Council not to discuss
with it generally the tenets of Huss and Jerome.
These four articles may be said to have formed
the new constitution of the kingdom of Bohemia.
They struck at the foundation of the Roman
hierarchy, and implied a large measure of
reformation. The eventual consolidation of the
nation's civil and religious liberties would have
been their inevitable result. The supreme authority
of the Scriptures, which the Hussites maintained,
implied the emancipation of the conscience, the
beginning of all liberty. The preaching of the
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