ABSTRACT
In an old novel, still famous and once widely popular, the writer, oppressed with the burden of evil in the world, gives to her heroine the name Consuelo, 'Consolation', and makes her half-mad hero a a descendant of a strange sect. He is one of those Bohemian Lollards who, despairing of any sympathy from God, threw themselves into the protecting arms of their fellow-outcast, fellow-sufferer, fellowvictim of persecution and slander, the Devil. Their word of salutation was: 'The Injured One give you greeting,' or 'The Injured One give you blessing'. And they made of the Injured One a figure rather resembling the suffering Christ, a champion of the poor and lowly, a Being more than persecuted, more than crucified, but differing from Christ inasmuch as he was no friend of Pope, priest or Emperor, and therefore, presumably no friend of God; he was still unconquered and unreconciled. If the belief seems to us bizarre or even depraved, it can only be for a moment. The clue to it is that it is a belief of the persecuted and helpless, who know their own innocence and deduce the wickedness of their rulers. To these pious and simple mountain peasants, followers first of John Huss and Zyska, and then of leaders more ignorant and fiery, the world became gradually a place dominated by enemies. Every person in authority met them with rack and sword, cursed their religious leaders as emissaries of the Devil, and punished them for all the things which they considered holy. The earth was the Lord's, and the Pope and Emperor were the vicegerents of God upon the earth. So they were told; and in time they accepted the statement. That was the division of the world. On one side God, Pope and Emperor and the army of persecutors; on the other themselves, downtrodden and poor, their saintly leaders hunted like beasts, and, above all, their eternal comforter and fellow-rebel, that exiled Star of the Morning, cast into darkness and torment like his innocent children. Let them be true to him, and surely his day must come!
