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The Great Controversy
by his subservience to Rome. For twenty years his life had been filled
with labors and perils. His armies had been wasted and his treasuries
drained by a long and fruitless struggle; and now, after reigning one
year, he died, leaving his kingdom on the brink of civil war, and
bequeathing to posterity a name branded with infamy.
Tumults, strife, and bloodshed were protracted. Again foreign
armies invaded Bohemia, and internal dissension continued to distract
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the nation. Those who remained faithful to the gospel were subjected
to a bloody persecution.
As their former brethren, entering into compact with Rome,
imbibed her errors, those who adhered to the ancient faith had
formed themselves into a distinct church, taking the name of “United
Brethren.” This act drew upon them maledictions from all classes.
Yet their firmness was unshaken. Forced to find refuge in the woods
and caves, they still assembled to read God’s word and unite in His
worship.
Through messengers secretly sent out into different countries, they
learned that here and there were “isolated confessors of the truth, a few
in this city and a few in that, the object, like themselves, of persecution;
and that amid the mountains of the Alps was an ancient church, resting
on the foundations of Scripture, and protesting against the idolatrous
corruptions of Rome.”—Wylie, b. 3, ch. 19. This intelligence was
received with great joy, and a correspondence was opened with the
Waldensian Christians.
Steadfast to the gospel, the Bohemians waited through the night
of their persecution, in the darkest hour still turning their eyes toward
the horizon like men who watch for the morning. “Their lot was
cast in evil days, but ... they remembered the words first uttered by
Huss, and repeated by Jerome, that a century must revolve before
the day should break. These were to the Taborites [Hussites] what
the words of Joseph were to the tribes in the house of bondage: ‘I
die, and God will surely visit you, and bring you out.’”—Ibid., b. 3,
ch. 19. “The closing period of the fifteenth century witnessed the
slow but sure increase of the churches of the Brethren. Although far
from being unmolested, they yet enjoyed comparative rest. At the
commencement of the sixteenth century their churches numbered two
hundred in Bohemia and Moravia.”—Ezra Hall Gillett, Life and Times
of John Huss, vol. 2, p. 570. “So goodly was the remnant which,