John Huss was rather a reformer than a heresiarch. Admirer though he was of Wickliffe, even to the point of wishing to risk damnation with him,[947] he avoided the doctrinal errors of the Englishman on the subject of the Eucharist. Yet his predestinarian views were unorthodox, and he shared in some degree Wickliffe’s Gregorian ideas as to the effect of mortal sin in divesting the priesthood of all claim to sacredness or respect. According to his enemies, he asserted that no one could be the vicar of Christ or of Peter unless he were an humble imitator of the virtues of him whom he claimed to represent; and a pope who was given to avarice was only the representative of Judas Iscariot.[948] His friend, Jerome of Prague, maintained with his latest breath that Huss was thoroughly orthodox, and was only inspired by indignation at seeing the wealth of the church, which was the patrimony of the poor, lavished on prostitutes, feasting, hunting, rich apparel, and other unseemly extravagance.[949] In the Bohemian clergy he had an ample target for his assaults, for they were in no respect better than their neighbors. During the latter half of the fourteenth century scarce a synod was held which did not denounce their vices, gambling, drunkenness, usury, simony, and concubinage; and when to put an end to the latter irregularity a strict visitation was made throughout the archiepiscopal diocese of Prague, the cunning rogues sent away or secreted their partners in guilt, and openly recalled them as soon as the storm had passed. The following year, Archbishop Sbinco peremptorily commanded that all concubines should be dismissed within six days, under pain of perpetual imprisonment, but this was evidently regarded as a mere _brutum fulmen_, for the next year a new device was resorted to, by pronouncing all concubinary priests to be heretics.[950] All this might certainly seem to warrant any effort that might be made to accomplish what the authorities so signally failed in doing, but that any individual should assert the right of private judgment in reforming the church in its head and its members threatened results too formidable to the whole structure of sacerdotalism, and the condemnation of Huss was inevitable. Still, like Wickliffe, he was a devout believer in ascetic purity. His denunciations of the wealth and disorders of the clergy raised so great an excitement throughout Bohemia that King Wenceslas was forced to issue a decree depriving immoral ecclesiastics of their revenues. The partisans of Huss took a lively interest in the enforcement of this law, and brought the unhappy ecclesiastics before the tribunals with a pertinacity which amounted to the persecution of an inquisition.[951]