The councils showed wisdom in pursuing their legal reform, for it alone could avert a revolution. Almost at the same moment that the Council of Pisa endeavoured to bring the great schism of the west to a cessation, and the Council of Constance to reform the church, the first efforts of a popular religious reform broke out with violence in Bohemia. The preachings and progress of John Huss date from 1404, the period that he commenced to teach at Prague. Thus there were two reforms marching side by side; the one in the very bosom of the church, experimented by the aristocratical ecclesiastics themselves, a prudent, timid, and thwarted reform; the other a reform outside the church, opposed to it, violent and fierce. War soon raged between these two powers or designs. The council summoned John Huss and Jerome of Prague to Constance, and condemned them to the stake as heretics and revolutionists. These events are perfectly intelligible to us at the present day. We can very readily understand the simultaneousness of separate reforms, the one undertaken by governments, the other by the people, enemies of each other, and yet emanating from the same source, and conducting to the same end; reforms which, although making war upon each other, actually and definitively agreed in a common object. Such was the occurrence in the fifteenth century. {194} The popular reform of John Huss was momentarily stifled; the war of the Hussites did not break out for three or four years after the death of their master. It continued for a long time with great violence, but the Empire finally triumphed. But as the reform attempted by the councils was unattended with effect, as the object they had pursued was not attained, the popular reform ceased not to ferment; it waited only for an opportunity, and it found one at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Had the reform undertaken by the councils been carried to a beneficial length, the popular reform perhaps would have been prevented. But the success of the one or the other was unavoidable, for their coincidence proves a necessity.