In the meantime, the Council, with singular maladroitness, had singled out for special condemnation the granting of the Cup to the laity; and thus, at one stroke, they changed the doctrine of a few obscure men into the war-cry of an indignant nation. This decree called the attention to Hus to this matter, which, till then, he had not deeply considered; and he wrote to his successor at the Bethlehem Chapel that he ought not to oppose the granting of the Cup to the laity, since there was nothing but custom against it; and that, if he opposed Jakaubek, there would be a division amongst the faithful.
But, while Hus was thus interesting himself in the affairs of his countrymen, the Council were not suffering him to rest in peace. One of the few priests who had shown themselves friendly to Hus at the Council wrote to him urging sophistical arguments in favour of a form of recantation; and Pálec̆ paid him several visits, to worry him into confessions of heresy. Yet, bitterly as he felt the persecutions of his former follower, that same self-distrust and earnest desire for justice which he had shown in the question of the three votes, and again on his retirement from Prague, appeared, even more remarkably, in this last interview. He entreated his enemy to pardon him for having charged him with deliberate falsehood on the occasion of Pálec̆’s first attacks in the Council. The savage apostate was moved even to tears for the moment, though his pity was of short duration.
At last, on July 5th, Wenceslaus of Duba and John of Chlum were sent to the prison to demand Hus’s final answer. But these messengers had been ill-chosen as exponents of the sophistries of Sigismund and the Cardinals. John of Chlum addressed the prisoner as follows: “Master John, we are laymen and cannot advise you. Therefore, see if there is anything in the things which they object to you, in which you feel you are to blame. If so, do not fear to be instructed and to revoke it; but, if you do not feel yourself guilty in your conscience in these things, then by no means act against your conscience, nor lie in the sight of God, but rather continue till the death in the truth which you have acknowledged.” Then Hus answered, “Lord John! know, that if I knew that I had written or preached anything contrary to the law or to our Holy Mother the Church, God is my witness that I would humbly revoke it. But I always desired that they should show me better and more probable Scriptures than those that I had taught; and, if they are shown me, I will most readily recant.” A bishop, who had come with the Bohemian nobles, now introduced the sophistical platitude which is common on such occasions--“Do you wish,” he said, “to be wiser than the whole Council?” “I do not wish,” answered Hus, “to be wiser than the whole Council; but I ask you to give me the least of the Council who can inform me by better and more efficacious Scriptures; and I am ready to revoke what I said.”