20 - Hus Burned
Chapter XX - Hus Burned In the church-yard they were just burning the books of Hus; he smiled sadly. With a firm step, singing and praying, Hus went to the “Bruehl,” a quarter of a mile north of the Schnetz gate. There he knelt, spread out his hands, lifted up his face, and prayed with a loud voice: “Into Thy hands I commit my spirit.” The paper cap, “the crown of blasphemy,” as it was called, fell to the ground, and Hus noticed the three painted devils; smiling sadly, he said: “Lord Jesus Christ, I will bear patiently and humbly this horrible and shameful and cruel death for the sake of Thy Gospel and the preaching of Thy word.”
He was stripped of his clothes, his hands roped behind his back, his neck chained to the stake, wood and straw were piled around him neck-high. They say as an old woman brought her few fagots to the funeral pile, Hus cried out: “O sancta simplicitas!” O holy simplicity. Another story goes Hus said: “Today you are burning a goose (hus in Bohemian); in a hundred years will come a swan you will not burn.” This came true in Luther. In the last moment the Marshal of the realm, Pappenheim, called on Hus to recant and save his life. “God is my witness that I never taught of what false witnesses accuse me. In the truth of the Gospel, that I have written, taught, and preached, I will today joyfully die.” The fagots were lighted. With raised voice Hus sang: “O Christ, Thou Son of the living God, have mercy on me.” When he sang that and continued, “Thou that art born of the Virgin Mary,” the wind drove the flames into his face; his lips and head still moved; then he choked without a sound. As the flames flickered down, the executioners knocked over the stake with the charred body still dangling by the neck, heaped on more wood, poked up the bones with sticks, broke in the skull, ran a sharp stake through the heart, and set the whole ablaze again. The jumbled embers were thrown into a wheelbarrow and tipped into the Rhine.
Like Luther later, Hus placed his conscience above the mighty Emperor, the infallible Pope, and the learning of the world; he would rather die than lie.
Even Aeneas Sylvius, later Pope Pius II, afterwards said with admiration: “No one of the ancient Stoics ever met his death more bravely.” A year later, on May 30, on the same spot in the same clover field they burned Jerome of Prag. He went to his death with a smiling face. “You condemn me, though innocent. But after my death I will leave a sting in you. I call on you to answer me before Almighty God within a hundred years.” When the fagots were lighted, he sang the Easter hymn, “Hail, Festal Day,” and protested his innocence to the bystanders. His last words were in Bohemian, “God Father, forgive me my sins.” A great stone marks the spot where the two Bohemian saints ascended to heaven in chariots of fire. The words of Erasmus might well have been his epitaph “John Hus, burned, not convicted.” Lechler says: “To inflict defeat by meeting defeat, that was his lot.”
Wiclif and Hus are the constellation “Gemini,” or Twins, shining in the papal night till their dim twinkling is swallowed up in the glorious sun bursting from Wittenberg in Luther. The Synod of Pisa tried to reform the Church and failed. The Synod of Constance tried it and failed. The Synod of Basel and Ferrara tried it and failed. The Fifth General Lateran Synod from 1512-1517 tried it and failed. The great Roman Catholic scholar Von Doellinger says: “The last hope of a reformation of the Church was carried to the grave.”
What could not be done by all Europe was done by Luther.
Luther’s reformation brought liberty for Church and State, and to him we owe it that men like Hus can no longer be burned.