The great thing done by the council of Constance was, that it declared a general council to be above the pope, and entitled to depose popes if the good of the Church should require it. CHAPTER XXV. THE HUSSITES. A.D. 1418-1431. The news of Huss's death naturally raised a general feeling of anger in Bohemia, where his followers treated his memory as that of a saint, and kept a festival in his honour. And when the emperor Sigismund, in 1419, succeeded his brother Wenceslaus in the kingdom of Bohemia, he found that he was hated by his new subjects on account of his share in the death of Huss. But, although most of the Bohemians might now be called Hussites, there were great divisions among the Hussites themselves. Some had lately begun to insist that in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper both the bread and the wine should be given to all the people, according to our Lord's own example, instead of allowing no one but the priest to receive the wine, according to the Roman practice. These people who insisted on the sacramental cup were called _Calixtines_, from the Latin _calix_, which means a _cup_ or _chalice_. But among those who agreed in this opinion there were serious differences as to some other points. In the summer of 1419, the first public communion was celebrated at a place where the town of Tabor was afterwards built. It was a very different kind of ceremony from what had been usual. There were three hundred altars, but they were without any covering; the chalices were of wood, the clergy wore only their every-day dress; and a love-feast followed, at which the rich shared with their poorer brethren. The wilder party among the Hussites were called _Taborites_, from Tabor, which became the chief abode of this party. They now took to putting their opinions into practice. They declared churches and their ornaments, pictures, images, organs, and the like, to be abominable; and they went about in bands, destroying everything that they thought superstitious. And thus Bohemia, which had been famous for the size and beauty of its churches, was so desolated that hardly a church was left in it; and those which are now standing have almost all been built since the time when the Hussites destroyed the older churches.