Again it was Bohemia which was the first country, not only among the Slavs, but in the whole of Europe, to carry high the banner of religious freedom. The Germans boast of the contribution to freedom of thought by their Luther, and they constantly forget that a century before him Hus had prepared the ground for that religious dissent which was voiced by Luther and his contemporaries. In the fourteenth century Bohemians were fond of attending foreign universities, especially those of Paris and Oxford. In the latter place they became acquainted with Wiclif and, returning home, they translated his works and laid the foundation for that remarkable activity which is known as Husitism. Matěj of Janov, who had studied at Paris, had even before Hus put himself in opposition to Popery, but it was Hus’s particular desert to have roused the Čech national feeling. Hus was opposed not only to the corruptions that had crept into the Church, but also to the anti-nationalistic activities of the Germans, and so headed the movement which had for its purpose a Čech regeneration. Čech became the language of intercourse, and a large number of translations of the Bible into Čech was made between 1400 and 1430, the most remarkable being that written by a Taborite miller’s wife. Hus became the first rector of the Čech Prague University, after the German students had withdrawn to the newly formed University of Leipsic. Bohemia was rent by disorder, not only from without, but also within the Husitic movement itself. Husitism stood not only for religious freedom, but also for democracy, and for a time the Husites got along without a king. The most advanced of these democratic protagonists of that time was Chelčický, who dreamed of a millennium, not unlike the one represented in literature at the present time by Tolstoy. His chief desert lies in having, by his writings, promoted the formation of the Church of Bohemian Brethren. The idea of Slavic nationality was not confined to Bohemia alone. The growth of a similar national feeling in Poland may be discerned as the result of this Čech renascence, and the Southern Slavs, too, were directly and indirectly influenced by the nationalism in the North. Indeed, the golden age of Polish and Serbian literature is but a century older than the rebirth of the Slavic idea in Bohemia.