To mrs Friends
(Without date: middle March 1415) I send a rhyming answer plain, To match your letter’s cheerful strain, The whale did Jonah safe restore: No marks of lions Daniel bore: Three Hebrews were by fire unharmed, Susannah charges false disarmed.! And why? Just, innocent and pure, Each kept in God a trust most sure, Their righteous Lord, Who sets those Who hope in Him eternally. “Iis He, Who can th imprisoned Goose From durance vile in mercy loose. Yet bonds do purge his former stains And contrite tears turn joys to pains: That he, Christ’s prisoner, may learn To bear reproaches and discern Curses and shame in their true light, To bruise the tempter’s head, to fight And conquer death: or else to wrest From life itself its guerdon best. God of mercy preserve you and give in His grace, and grant to you with in Constance;? for if we shall be constant,
[These were favourite illustrations with Hus, See p. 176.]
[Of. pp. 159, 160, 195.]
we shall see the Lord coming to our aid. For the first time I am now learning to understand the book of Psalms! to pray as I ought, to ponder over the insults of Christ and the sufferings of the martyrs, as Isaiah saith: Vexation alone shall make you wnderstand what you hear? Again: What doth he know, that hath mot been tried?
I don’t understand what our learned doctor of Biberach wants. The Goose conjectures nothing from his negligence in writing, except that he is well in body. May his soul’s health especially be confirmed by the Lord! for it is his soul’s health, no less than his bodily health, that I hope is being improved, and will after death be perfected in bliss with all the saints.
In prison hid from human sight, the stated offices of night
I The gospel readings as they fall,
Litanies, vigils do not pall
The hours” pass lightly:5 for this road
The Master went, Who bore our load. This is my passion, naught indeed, or slight, if I from sin be freed
May Christ the Lord stand by His own,
Lest Antichrist do gulp me down!
Rejoice all of you, who are one in the Lord. Greet one another, and prepare yourselves worthily to eat the Lord’s Body before Easter. Ishall be without it, so far as the outward elements are concerned, as now
[!In 1404 Hus had written a commentary of some length on Psalms]
[cx.-cxix, See Mon. ii. 229 ff.]
[Isa. xxviii. 19. Ecclus, xxxiv. 9. See p. 188 a.]
[5 Nocturnus, gradus, litanie, singule hore, etc. Gradus seems a]
[loose use for the more usual gradale. Quoad sacramentalem perceptionem.]
for a long time I have been without it} and still shall be, as long as God wills. And no wonder, since Christs apostles and many other saints in prisons and desert abodes were likewise without it.
I rejoice that you stand together and that Zelezny Brada! is in good health with you all So am I too, trusting as I do in Jesus; but I shall be in better health after death, if I keep God’s commands to the end. Would that God would give me time to write against the lies of the Chancellor of Paris, who so presumptuously and unjustly before the world hath dared to charge his neighbour with heresy.? But perchance God will cut short his writing either by my death or his, and in His judg ment will settle the matter better than any writing of mine could do.
Meanwhile in Constance the struggle between the Council and John XXIIL, which had begun in the proposal for his abdication, had rapidly reached a crisis. John realised that his last throw must be made. On March 20? he left Constance in an indecent days later the Council received news that he had arrived at disguised lay dress’ in the darkness of a foggy night) Two Schaffhausen. Hus soon learned the news, and adds an interesting comment.
If Hus’s first letter after the flight of John gives little indication of the excitement at Constance, his second letter, written three days later, throws a vivid side-light on the confusion. Hus himself ran some danger of starvation. Hitherto the Pope had paid ten florins a week for Hus’s support and the expenses of his imprisonment. Not only was this supply cut off, but, as
[!These words mean Ironbeard,” Palacky suggests that the]
[person intended is therefore John Barbatus (for whom, see p. 44), who]
[on p. 189 is called Zelezny Jan, Bearded John,” and of whom Hus]
[there says that he does not know where he is. Cf. p. 219, x. 1.? p. 189, n. 3.? For the date see App. M. p. 360 of my Age of Hus.]
we learn from an anonymous letter of April 2, provisions in Constance ran very short (Doc. 543). The country folk were too uncertain of the future to bring in, as hitherto, their stores. Hus also was in no small alarm.
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