In This Picture, The
Idea That Most Impressed Me Was, The Representation Of That More
Refined And Subtle Torture Of Martyrdom Which Consists In The
Incertitude And Weakness Of An Individual Against Whom Is Arrayed The
Whole Weight Of The Religious Community.
If against the martyr only
the worldly and dissolute stood arrayed, he could bear it; but when
the church,
Claiming to be the visible representative of Christ, casts
him out; when multitudes of pious and holy souls, as yet unenlightened
in their piety, look on him with horror as an infidel and blasphemer,
- then comes the very wrench of the rack. As long as the body is
strong, and the mind clear, a consciousless of right may sustain even
this; but there come weakened hours, when, worn by prison and rack,
the soul asks itself, "Can it be that all the religion and
respectability of the world is wrong, and I alone right?" Such an
agony Luther expressed in that almost superhuman meditation written
the night before the Diet at Worms. Such an agony, the historian tells
us, John Huss passed through the night before his execution.
Now for the picture. The painter has arrayed, with consummate ability,
in the foreground a representation of the religious respectability of
the age: Italian cardinals, in their scarlet robes, their keen,
intellectual, thoughtful faces, shadowed by their broad hats; men whom
it were no play to meet in an argument; there are gray-headed,
venerable priests, and bishops with their seal rings of office, - all
that expressed the stateliness and grandeur of what Huss had been
educated to consider the true church.
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