Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. JOHN HUS. A. D. 1373-1416. In the lonely struggle of duty, the inevitable loss of human aid must be replaced by our affinity with God. He that invented human virtue, and breathed into us our private veneration for its greatness; He that loves the martyr-spirit, scorning suffering for the sake of truth; He that beholds in every faithful miml the reflection of Himself; He that hath built an everlasting world, at once the shelter of victorious goodness and the theatre of its yet nobler triumphs, enwraps us in His immensity, and sustains us by His love. —james Maktineau, The Strength of the Lonely. JOHN HUS. A. D. 1373-1416. As we look upon a historical map, representing the Europe of the Middle Ages, no obvious relation is suggested as existing between the island of Great Britain and a little state in the heart of continental Europe, called Bohemia. There seems to be but one point of resemblance even, and that somewhat fanciful : Britain is insulated by water, and Bohemia is isolated by a surrounding wall of mountains. The latter country, indeed, is not unlike a vast natural fortification, lying four-square, with its angles closely coinciding with the cardinal points of the compass. This great square mountain embankment, perfectly unbroken save a little opening or gateway in the southeast into Moravia, incloses an area of nearly twenty thousand square miles; so that if you were to take a map of New England and look at it diagonally, the two States of New Hampshire and Vermont, taken together, would resemble Bohemia in shape, and would not materially differ from it in superficial measurement. But this fanciful point of resemblance which I have noticed between the isolation of Bohemia and the insulation of Great Britain is not so fanciful as to have been unproductive...