In the meantime the reform movement had been approaching a crisis. The teacher who, after the death of Milic, had gained most influence in the country, was a Bohemian nobleman named Matthias of Janov. He had not devoted himself so exclusively as Conrad and Milic had done to the denunciation of moral abuses, but had also attacked practices like the worship of images and saints; and he had been the first to bring before the public the question which was afterwards to be so interesting to Bohemians, the granting of the cup to the laity in the Holy Communion. But though this latter fact gives Matthias a kind of historic interest, he seems to have been in the main a source of weakness to the cause which he defended. Never wholly disinterested in his objects, he soon flinched from the attacks of the rulers of the Church; and in 1389 he formally recanted his reforming doctrines.
Along with the movement for ecclesiastical reform, the Bohemian national revival had been steadily making way; and the opposition of the German party had served to deepen the zeal of the reformers for the encouragement of the Bohemian languages. A most important link was formed in 1396 between the linguistic and the moral revival. In that year a man named John of Milheim founded a chapel which was to be entirely devoted to Bohemian preaching, in order, as its founder expressed it, “that the Word of God should not be fettered, and that Bohemian preachers should not be obliged to go from house to house.” The new foundation was to be called the Bethlehem Chapel, and was to be consecrated to the Holy Innocents. Strange to say, the first three preachers seem to have been somewhat hesitating and uncertain in their tendencies; and it was not till 1402 that the appointment of Jan Hus secured to the Bethlehem Chapel a special position in the history of Bohemia.
[Illustration: HUSINEC, SHOWING COTTAGE WHERE HUS WAS BORN.]
On July 6, 1369, Jan Hus was born at Husinec, in the south of Bohemia. This village lies in a deep valley among pine-covered hills, and the tiny cottage in which Hus was born still remains. As his parents were poor, he was forced to support himself in his early days by singing in churches; and even after he had been sent to the University he was in such straits that he was at one time compelled to live on dry bread. Nevertheless he made steady way in the University; two years after taking his degree of Master of Arts, he was appointed examiner; in 1401 he was elected Dean of the Faculty of Arts, and in 1403 he was chosen Rector of the University. He had thrown himself from the first into the national cause; and he denounced, from his pulpit in the Bethlehem Chapel, the expedition of the rebel nobles against Prague. He showed great zeal in giving new literary expression to the Bohemian language, and expunged from it the Germanisms which had crept into it. He also persistently opposed the encroachments of the Germans in the government of the University. At the same time he always declared that he would prefer a good German to a bad Bohemian, even if the latter were his brother.