any adequate record of success. Ignorantly he had entailed upon France and Germany the convulsions that for a century, after Luther, made Europe an Aceldama. Nay, the French Revolution itself may be traced to the reactionary consequences of Gerson's failure to promote such a Catholic Restoration as was insured in England under wiser counsels. Poor John Gerson! To his fanatical aversions we owe another disgraceful act, which likened this Council to hyænas that prey upon the dead. Wiclif's bones must be dug

up and consumed. On such a dismal errand came commissioners to quiet Lutterworth, and there they enacted this mockery. The sacred ashes of the great confessor were thrown into a little brook that murmurs under the old walls of his church. And Fuller quaintly says: "Thus this brook hath conveyed his ashes into Avon, Avon into Severn, Severn into the narrow seas, then into the main ocean; and thus the ashes of Wiclif are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the world over."

17. ONE VOTE AND THE CONSEQUENCES.

The eloquence of Jerome as he pleaded before the Council is said to have left Cicero in the shade.

Huss was hardly less eloquent. Both were yet young men. Huss suffered on his birthday, aged forty-five; Jerome was about the same age, and was a layman. With them passed away the hope of Catholic reformation for the Latin churches. One vote cast at Constance by the English Bishop

That

of Bath elected Martin V. in place of John. vote, says Dean Hook, "delayed the cause of reform for a century." It did far more. It threw the inevitable into the hands of another generation, and of men of another character, who, as I have shown, were not restorers, but Scholastic doctors, giants who built up nothing in place of what they threw down.

18. THE COUNCIL OF BASLE.

We must regard the Council of Basle as a mere continuation of that of Constance, and it was far more resolute and creditable to its engineers. Pope Martin was forced to convoke it,1 and severe were its reproaches against his duplicity in trying to postpone. Over and over again had he laboured to convene it in Italy, but they defied him, and insisted on Basle, under Sigismund's protection. Here was something like Frankfort again. He did not live to see it opened, and was succeeded by Eugenius IV. This Pope pronounced the Council dissolved, but they asserted their superiority as a "General Council," and went on. They proved too strong for the Pope, and he was forced to yield and recognize their claims. Gerson was no longer living to control them, but their history is that of a final testimony about the Paparchy. And praiseworthy, so far as they went, were their tokens of better feeling towards the Hussites, to whom they restored the communion in both kinds, reversing what was done at Constance. The chal

1 December 14, 1431.

ice thus restored gave the adherents of Huss the reputable name of Calixtines. This was an entire overruling of Martin, who had only preached in the spirit of Innocent III., a crusade of extermination against the Hussites. But all too late! There was no John Huss to guide his friends and to give this Council a truly primitive character. The book of life was shut; the seals were to be broken in another generation, but only to disclose thunderings and voices. A Titanic avenger was to ride on the whirlwind, but he was wholly unable to direct the storm; and they who had burned Huss and Jerome, and strewn the ashes of Wiclif, were chastised by Luther first, and then given over to the oligarchy of Laynez the Jesuit. Either extreme was abhorrent to the doctors of Constance and of Basle; but their fatal compromises were the creators of both alike. Luther's agitations crossed the Alps, and at one time had begun to work under the eaves of the Vatican itself; but when this last menace was disregarded, there was nothing left to Rome but an absolute surrender to the Society of Loyola. These ate the oyster and awarded the shells. They assumed to themselves all the supremacy which Basle had claimed for a General Council, and to the Pope they conceded only the homage of doing everything in his name.

19. TWO POINTS SET RIGHT.

Perhaps I have sufficiently illustrated my points, as to the Anglican Restoration and the "Reformation" of Luther. (1.) The Anglican work begun

and was wrought from within,-begun under Wiclif, who only brought to a focus what had been continuously maintained by Anglican witnesses, from the Norman invasion onward, and what was resumed, and brought to the issue of a restored autonomy, under Henry, and Edward, his son. (2.) The German Reformers lighted their candle from England; there could have been no Luther but for Huss and Jerome, the disciples of Wiclif. How absurd and illogical, therefore, is the conventional instruction of our school histories, and even of Church historians, who treat of our Anglican Reformation as if it began with Luther's burning of the Pope's bull! They make it an importation from Germany, if not from the Diet of Spires, where the Lutherans were called Protestants. Let those admire a feeble and impotent name of negation and discord who can possibly do so; but the reader of Kahnis must exclaim,

"Can aught exult in its deformity?"

20. POLITICAL PROTESTANTISM.

But let us not fall into vulgar mistakes about the Protestants. As a political cause, my sympathies are with the Protestant heroes and sufferers. Theologically, I cannot go with them, although the worst mistakes of Calvin and Luther are venial as compared with the Council of Trent, its monstrous "Code of Belief," and its daring dictation to Christendom of a new Creed, equalizing the mere novelties of Pius IV. with the Nicene symbol, making it more practically the Creed, and not

less essential to salvation. In the conflicts and wars it generated, my heart is with the lost cause of the Calixtines and the Huguenots. I had rather be with the poor "winter-king" of Bohemia, than with Louis XIV. ravaging the Palatinate, desolating the Rhineland, and revoking the Edict of Nantes. Yes, and who would not choose death with Coligny, rather than share with Catherine de Medicis and the pontiff that awful account with God for the massacre of St. Bartholomew's day? To come nearer to our own times, recall the sorrows and sufferings of the godly Jansenists, the nuns of Port Royal dragged out of their graves, like Wiclif, and their chaste bodies exposed to the worst indignities, while their very roof was torn away from the heads of the survivors, their walls levelled, and their names covered with anathemas. Gracious Lord! that a Church should call itself "Catholic" which was too narrow for a Pascal, an Arnauld, a Nicole, nay, too narrow for Bossuet and the old Gallicans, whose condemnation at the late Vatican conventicle was as real as that of Wiclif at Constance, and whose bones would just as certainly be exhumed and cremated, were it possible just now to execute such an auto-da-fé in Republican France.

Let me pause a moment for a reflection. It has often struck you, perhaps, as I have had to recount the history of events that disgrace our holy religion, to ask, "Where is the religion of