§ 72. The Bohemian Brethern and the Waldenses.

HUS^10731073    Hus (i.e., Goose) and Hussites (from the Bohemian genitive Husses) is the correct spelling, followed by Palacky and Gindely, instead of Huss and Husites. AND THE HUSSITES.

The reformation in the Kingdom of Bohemia (now a political division 566of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), began with John Hus and Jerome of Prague, who were influenced by the doctrines of Wycliffe, and who carried with them the greater part of the population, the Slavic Czechs. They were condemned by the œcumenical Council of Constance as heretics, and burned at the stake, the former July 6, 1415, the latter May 30, 1416. But their martyrdom provoked the Husite wars which would have resulted in the triumph of the Husites, had not internal divisions broken their strength.

The followers of Hus were, from 1420, divided into two parties, the conservative Calixtines, so called from their zeal for the chalice (calix) of the laity, or Utraquists (communio sub utraque specie), and the radical Taborites, so named from a steep mountain which their blind but brave and victorious leader, Ziska (d. 1424), fortified and called Mount Tabor. The Calixtines accepted the compromise of communion in both kinds, which the Council of Basle offered to them (1433), and mostly returned to the Roman Church. The Taborites rejected all compromise with the hated papal Antichrist, and demanded a thorough reformation, but they were defeated by the allied Romanists and Calixtines near Prague, 1434, and subdued by George Podiebrad, 1453.

THE BOHEMIAN BRETHERN.

From this time the Taborites disappeared as a party, but from their remnants arose, about 1457, a new and a more important sect, the Unitas Fratrum (Jednota bratrská), as they called themselves, or the Bohemian Brethren.^10741074   This name applies also to the members who emigrated to Moravia, Saxony, and Poland; but the name Moravian Brethren does not occur until the 18th century, when Zinzendorf incorporated into his own society (the Moravians, properly so called) the last survivors of the Bohemian brotherhood, who had come from Moravia to Saxony. See Gindely, Vol. I. p. 36. They were also called Waldenses, and in derision Picards (probably the same as Beghards) and Grubenheimer, Pit-dwellers (because they held divine service in pits and caves). They adhered to the rigid discipline of the Taborites, but were free from their fanaticism and violence. They endeavored to reproduce, in peaceful retirement from the world, the simplicity and spirituality of the Apostolic Church as they understood it. They held to the Bohemian version of the Bible revised by Hus^10751075   Another Bohemian version or revision of the New Testament was made from the Greek by Blahoslav, a member of the Unitas Fratrum and the author of a Bohemian grammar (d. 1571). as their only standard of faith and conduct. They rejected worldly amusements, oaths, military service, and capital punishment; they opposed 567the secular power of the clergy, and denounced the Pope of Rome as Antichrist. At first they received the sacraments from Calixtine and Romish priests who joined them.

In 1467 they effected an independent organization at a synodical meeting held in the village of Lhota, which was attended by about fifty members, priests and laymen, scholars and peasants, under the lead of Michael, formerly a Catholic priest. After praying and fasting, they elected by lot (Acts i. 26) three priests out of their number, and laid hands on them. Then they were all solemnly rebaptized. But not satisfied with this independent reconstruction of the Church, they sought regular ordination from a Waldensian bishop, Stephen of Austria, who was reported to have been ordained by a Roman bishop in 1434, and who afterwards suffered martyrdom in Vienna. Stephen ordained Michael; Michael ordained Matthias of Kunwald, and then, laying down his dignity, asked to be ordained afresh by Matthias, who was the first of the three elected by lot, and significantly bore the name of the supplementary apostle. This shows the vacillation of the Brethren between Presbyterianism and Episcopacy, as well as between radical independency and historical conservatism.^10761076   Gindely reports this from the scanty and conflicting sources, and adds the remark (Vol. I. p. 37): 'Es zeigt das Schwanken des Gemüths und den Zweifel an die Berechtigung der gethanen Schritte, dass die Brüder in ihren Schriften gleich nach der Wahl jede Differenz zwischen priesterlicher and bischöflicher Würde verwarfen, mil ängstlicher Gewissenhaftigkeit aber bei sich die letztere einführten.' But they retained, or meant to retain, an unbroken succession of the episcopate, and transmitted it afterwards to the Moravian Church.^10771077   The last bishop of the old Unitas Fratrum was John Amos Comenius (or Komensky, a Czech, born in Moravia, 1592, died at Amsterdam, 1671), who acquired great celebrity by his new method of instruction by pictures and illustrations, and by his Janua Linguarum reserrata and his Orbis pictus. His nephew, D. E. Jablonsky, was elected and ordained bishop by a Synod of Bohemian Brethren in Poland, 1698, and he ordained David Nitschmann, the first bishop of the Moravians, 1735. See E. von Schweinitz, The Moravian Episcopate (Bethlehem, Pa., 1865; comp. his art. Moravian Church, in Johnson's Univ. Cyclop. Vol. III.), and Benham, Origin and Episcopate of the Bohemian Brethren (Lond. 1867). The Moravian episcopate depends on the Bohemian, and the Bohemian on the Waldensian episcopate, which in the thirteenth century did not claim to rest on apostolic succession. Comp. the quotations in Gieseler, Kirchengesh. Vol. II. Pt. II. pp. 640, 641.

The Brethren were cruelly persecuted; many were tortured and burned; others fled to neighboring Moravia, where for a short season they were unmolested. In the beginning of the sixteenth century they numbered in Bohemia about 200,000 members with 400 parishes. 568They had three printing establishments in 1519, while the Romanists had only one, and the Utraquists two. They made valuable contributions to evangelical hymnology. Their most fruitful author was Lucas of Prague (d. 1528), who did more for the organization of the society than its founder Gregor, and wrote over eighty books.^10781078   Gindely, Vol. I. p. 2OO, and Von Zezschwitz, Lukas von Prag, in Herzog's Encyklop., Supplem. Vol. XX. pp 23 sqq., 31. Gindely, however, places no high estimate on the writings of Lucas, and charges him with great obscurity. They are mostly extant in manuscript.

THE WALDENSES.

Soon after their organization the Brethren came into friendly contact with the older and like-minded Waldenses (Vaudois), so called from their founder, Peter Waldo, or Waldus, a lay evangelist of Lyons (about 1170), who gave his rich possessions to the poor. They called 569themselves originally the Poor of Lyons, who by voluntary poverty and celibacy aimed at evangelical perfection.^10791079   The Dominican Stephen of Borbone says: 'Incepit hæc secta circa annum ab incarnatione Domini 1170 . . . Waldenses dicti sunt a primo huius hæresis auctore, qui nominatus fuit Waldensis. Dicuntur etiam Pauperes de Lugduno quia ibi inceperunt in professione paupertatis.' They were also called Leonistæ, from Leona, Lyons; Sabatati, from their wooden sandals (sabot); and Humiliati, from their humility. The early confessional and catechetical books of the two sects are closely connected. The Brethren derived, as already noted, their episcopate from the Waldenses, and in 1497 they sent two delegates, Lucas of Prague and Thomas of Landskron (Germanus), to France and Italy, who reported that the Waldenses in those countries were far advanced in the knowledge of Scripture truth, while elsewhere they found nothing but false doctrine, superstition, loose discipline, and corrupt morals.^10801080   Joachim Camerarius, in his Historica narratio de Fratrum orthod. ecclesiis in Bohemia (ed. by his grandson, Heidelb. 1605), gives a full account of two deputations of the Brethren to the Waldenses, one in 1467, and the other in 1497. See Herzog, pp. 290 sqq., and Gindely. Vol. I. pp. 88 sq. On the other hand, many of the exiled Waldenses, who spread in every direction,^10811081   Pseudo-Rainerius: 'fere nulla est terra, in qua hæc secta non sit.' emigrated to Bohemia, attracted by the religious commotions of that country, and coalesced with the Brethren into one community.

The Bohemian Brethren and the Waldenses made a near approach to evangelical Protestantism, and are the only mediæval sects which have maintained their existence to this day. But we must distinguish between their position before and their position after the Reformation, which marks an important epoch in their creed. Much confusion (as Gieseler observes) has been introduced into their history both by friend and foe.

The Waldenses formed at first no separate church, but an ecclesiola in ecclesia, a pious lay community of Bible-readers. They were well-versed in Scripture, and maintained its supremacy over the traditions of men; they preached the gospel to the poor, allowing women also to preach; and gradually rejected the papal hierarchy, purgatory, prayers for the dead, the worship of saints and relics, the mass, transubstantiation, the oath, and capital punishment. Being excommunicated by Lucius III. (1184) and other popes as schismatics and heretics, they seceded and became a persecuted church. They had a clergy of their own with bishops, priests, and deacons. The origin and succession of 570their orders are involved in obscurity. They survived the fierce persecutions in France and the valleys of Piedmont, and extended their influence through emigrants to other countries, kindling a zeal for the study of the Scriptures in the vernacular, and strengthening the opposition to the papal Church. When they heard the glad tidings of the Reformation, they sent a deputation—Morel and Masson—to Œcolampadius, Bucer, and other reformers, in 1530, and derived from them clearer views of the distinction between canonical and apocryphal books, justification by faith, election and free-will, the marriage of the clergy, and the nature and number of sacraments. At a synod in the valley of Angrogne, Sept. 12–18, 1532, which was attended also by Farel and two other Reformed preachers of French Switzerland, the Reformation was adopted by a large majority, and subsequently carried out. Since that time the Waldenses became and remained a regular branch of the Reformed Church.^10821082   Herzog, pp. 378 sqq.

In the course of time the consciousness of this change was obscured, and in their polemic zeal against Romanism they traced the Reformed doctrines to their fathers, who certainly prepared the way for them. Their manuscripts were interpolated and assigned to a much earlier date.^10831083   Leger dates, without any proof, the Nobla Leyczon and the Waldensian Catechism from the year 1100; the Confession of Faith, the tracts on Purgatory and the Invocation of Saints, from 1120; the book on Antichrist from 1126. Some of their historians even constructed an imaginary Waldensian succession of pure evangelical catholicity up to the apostolic age, in opposition to the papal succession of an apostate pseudo-catholicity, which they dated from the fictitious donation of Constantine to Pope Sylvester and the consequent secularization of the Church. This is the Protestant counterpart of the Romish caricatures of the Reformation, and deserves equal condemnation in the name of common honesty and historical truth.

A critical examination and comparison of the Waldensian manuscripts and the reports of the conferences with the Reformers have exposed these literary frauds, and produced at first a reaction against the Waldenses and in favor of the Bohemian Brethren, from whom some of their books were supposed to be derived. But on still further examination it appears that there was a mutual exchange of views and writings between the two, and that the assertions of some later Bohemian 571Brethren concerning their independence are as little to be trusted and as clearly unfounded as the claims of the Waldenses. Their oldest writings, from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, were popular translations of the Scriptures and extracts from the fathers, followed by more extended works, such as La Nobla Leyczon^10841084   Given in the original by Herzog, pp. 444–457, from the Geneva MS., with the variations of the Dublin text. Herzog assigns it to the year 1400. Ebrard, Ueber das Alter der Nobla Leyczon, in the Zeitschrift für histor. Theologie, 1864, and in his Kirchengesch. Vol. II. p. 193, traces it to the beginning of the thirteenth century, and defends the date of the Geneva MS., that the work was written fully eleven hundred years after St. John wrote, 'It is the last time' (1 John ii. 18), i.e., about 1200. (i.e., lectio, a didactic poem on Bible history and an exhortation to repentance), the Cantica, an allegorical exposition, or application rather, of the Song of Songs, and several poems and ascetic tracts. The second class embraces the writings of the fifteenth century (on Purgatory, the Invocation of Saints, and the Sacraments), which are more or less dependent on the Confessio Taboritarum (1433), and other Hussite documents.^10851085   See the comparison in Dieckhoff, pp. 377 sqq. The third class was not composed or put into its present shape till after the adoption of the Reformation in 1532. Their chief confession is based upon the Gallican (1559), and was issued during the fearful massacre of 1655.^10861086   See Vol. III. pp. 757 sqq.

The indebtedness of the Waldenses to the Reformation for a purer creed does not deprive them of a claim to the deep sympathy of all Protestant Christians, which in the period of their fiercest persecution in Piedmont (1655) provoked the threat of Cromwell to make the thunder of English cannon resound in the castle of St. Angelo, and inspired the sublime sonnet of Milton—

'Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones

Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;

Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,

When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones.

Forget not: in thy book record their groans,

Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold

Slain by the bloody Piedmontese, that rolled

Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans

The vales redoubled to the hills, and they

To heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow

O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway

The triple tyrant; that from these may grow

A hundredfold, who having learnt thy way

Early may fly the Babylonian woe.'

The last lines sound like a prophecy; for since the day of liberty dawned on Italy (in 1848), that venerable martyr church has, from its mountain retreats in Piedmont, with youthful vigor established missions in nearly all the cities of the peninsula.

THE WALDENSIAN CATECHISM (1489) AND THE BOHEMIAN CATECHISM (1521).

The doctrinal affinity of the Waldenses and the Bohemian Brethren appears especially in their Catechisms, which are the most important of all their writings before the Reformation, and which prove their zeal for Christian education on the basis of the Scriptures. They bear such a striking resemblance to each other that the one must be in part a copy from the other. The Waldensian Catechism has a better claim to originality, and, although not nearly as old as was formerly supposed,^10871087   Leger, Monastier, and Hahn trace it to the beginning of the twelfth century. must have been written before 1500; while the Bohemian, in the form in which it was presented to Luther, first appeared in print in 1521 or 1522, and was probably the work of Lucas of Prague (d. 1528), who had visited the Waldenses in Italy and France (1489). But both rest probably on older sources. Palacky brought to light (1869) a similar Catechism, which he derives from Hus before 1414.^10881088   Dieckhoff (pp. 98–115), from an imperfect knowledge of the Waldensian Catechism (as given by Perrin and Leger), maintained the priority of the Bohemian Catechism, and charged the Waldenses with gross plagiarism. Dr. Herzog (pp. 324 sq.) inclined to the same opinion, but with some qualification, and first edited the original text of the Waldensian Catechism from the Dublin MSS. in the Romance language (pp. 438–444). Since then Prof. Von Zezschwitz, of Erlangen, has published (1863) both Catechisms in their authentic form, with an elaborate argument for the priority of the Waldensian from internal evidence and from its affinity with other undoubted Waldensian documents. Ebrard (Vol. II. p. 491) assents to this view, and says: 'The Waldensian Catechism is thoroughly and characteristically Waldensian.' But Palacky traces both to a Bohemian Catechism (of about 4 pages) which he found in the imperial library of Vienna, and published, with a Latin version, in his Docmnenta relating to Hus (pp. 703, 708). The authorship of Hus, however, is a mere conjecture ('cuius autor Hus esse videtur'). The resemblance extends only to a few questions, and does not settle the point of priority; for Palacky himself admits that the Waldenses were in Prague as early as 1408, and known to Hus. 'The Hussites,' he says (Das Verhältniss der Waldenser, etc., p. 20), were both disciples and teachers of the Waldenses, but more the latter than the former.'

The Waldensian Catechism, called 'The Smaller Questions,'^10891089   Las interrogations menors. The more extensive work on Antichrist was likewise arranged in questions and answers. intended for children, is a remarkable production for an age of prevailing popular superstition and ignorance. It consists of fifty-seven questions 573by the teacher (lo barba, i.e., uncle), and as many answers by the pupil (l’enfant). It embodies the Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments, and is divided into three divisions—Faith (Ques. 6), Hope (Ques. 32), and Love (Ques. 47). This division was suggested by St. Paul (1 Cor. xiii. 13) and Augustine (Enchiridion), and is followed also in the Greek Catechism of Mogila and the Russian Catechism of Philaret. Under the head of Faith we have a practical exposition of the Apostles' Creed and the Ten Commandments, showing their subjective bearing on a living faith. In the Second Part (Ques. 32), Love is defined to be a gift of the Holy Spirit and an intimate union of the human will with the divine will. In the Third Part (Ques. 48), Hope is defined to be a certain expectation of grace and future glory. The Catechism is directed against the idolatry and superstition of the anti-Christian Church, but the opposition is indirect and moderate. The characteristic Waldensian features are the distinction between a living and a dead faith (Ques. 8); the six evangelical commandments (Ques. 21); the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit (Ques. 23); the distinction between the true or essential (invisible) Church (la gleisa de la part de la substancia), which consists of all the elect of God in Christ, known only to him, and the outward or institutional (visible) church (de la part de li menisteri), i.e., the ministers and the people subject to them (Ques. 35); and the rigid exposition of the second commandment against all forms of idolatry (Ques. 29). Of the sacraments it is said (Ques. 46): 'Two are absolutely necessary for all; the rest are less necessary.' This clearly indicates that the Catechism was written before the Reformation period, when the Waldenses rejected all but two sacraments.

The Bohemian Catechism is longer, having seventy-five questions and answers. It follows the "Waldensian in the general arrangement and first part, and introduces also (like the Greek catechisms) the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount (Ques. 31); it has more to say of idolatry, the worship of Mary, the saints and martyrs, and especially on the Lord's Supper; but these additions lack perspicuity, and are too long for the use of children.

The following specimen will give an idea of these Catechisms, and the relation they sustain to each other and to the Catechism ascribed to Hus: