Mr. Gillett has, therefore, done a good service in subordinating the story of John Huss to the history of his age.  His work is strictly entitled, “The Bohemian Reformation of the Fifteenth Century.”  That period has heretofore been almost a blank in our ecclesiastical records.  The blank is now filled.  It was a period of great beginnings.  Germany was silent then; but Wycliffe in England, and Huss, with his predecessors, Waldhauser, Milicz, and Peter of Dresden, in Bohemia, were even then causing the Papal power, rent as it was with its internal dissensions, to tremble as before approaching death.

The story of that impotent rage which sought to purchase life and safety for the Romish Church by the murder of Huss and of Jerome of Prague is instructive, if it is not pleasing.  The truth was too true to be spoken.  Never has the Church of Rome, in its inquisitorial madness, been so blinded with fury and passion as then.  Weakened by internal feuds, with two Popes struggling and hurling anathemas at each other, and with a priesthood at its lowest point, not of ignorance, but of carnality, it seemed in peril of utter extinction.  Its own boldest and ablest men were among its most outspoken accusers; and no words stronger or more cutting were spoken by Huss than by Gerson and Clemangis.  But Huss committed the common mistake of reformers.  He put himself outside of the body to be reformed.  He allowed his spirit to fret against the evils of his times so madly that he would fain have put himself outside of the circumstances of his age.  This wiser men than he, men no loss ardent, but more calculating, never would do.  In the city of Constance itself, during the sittings of the great Council which condemned Huss to death, sermons were preached more bitterly reproachful of the pride of the Pontiffs and the corruption of the Church than the words of any of the men who put themselves beyond its pale, and addressed it as “your Church,” instead of speaking of it as “ours.”  And while the dignitaries of that corrupt body dared not lay a finger upon their more pure, prophetic, and sharply accusing brethren, they made men like Huss and Jerome of Prague the doubly burdened and tortured victims of their rage.

Much of the interest of these volumes is owing to the prominence given to Wycliffe, and his contemporaneous work in England.  It is strange, indeed, that in those early days, before Europe was crossed with its net-works, not of railways, but of post-roads even, the land which inclosed the fountains that fed the Elbe, eight hundred miles above Hamburg, was closely bound to that distant island, four hundred miles beyond Hamburg, on the western side of the German Ocean.  But a royal marriage in England had united that kingdom to Bohemia, and Wycliffe’s name was a household word in the lecture-rooms of Prague, and Wycliffe’s books were well worn in its libraries.  The great work of preparation, the preliminary stirring-up of men’s minds, by both of these great reformers,