The ever changing story:
In post 51, you wrote: “This is laid the groundwork for the resentment that long simmered against the Latin church.”
So you started off with
1) posting an unsubstantiated claim
2) then called it a plausible scenario when you could find no evidence at all for it
3) then denied you posted the claim in the first place and claimed it belonged to the sect in question
4) then said it is a “supposition based on the fact”
5) now it “was a re-wording of the statement the Moravians themselves make”
Gibbs would be soooooo proud. Like I said, by next month it will be an “old wives tale”.
http://anglicanhistory.org/usa/misc/smith_czechoslovaks/
Conversion to Christianity
The Czechs became Christian long after the British, and even after the Anglo-Saxon invaders of Britain, but their Christianity came to them so romantically that the tale of it reads like some long-forgotten fiction of old folk-lore. But that the story is true, the witness of an ancient language testifies; for the Old Slavonic used in the Eastern Orthodox Churches still lives in the form that it had when it issued warm on the breath of the first Czech Christians a thousand years ago. Christianity came to the Czechs from the East, from Constantinople, and from Christian Greece. Two young men, consecrated missionaries, came out from Salonica with their learning and their zeal for Christ, and went up the Danube River past many a Slavic tribe and beyond the knowledge of man, until they found the pleasant and fertile valleys of Moravia. These were Cyril and Methodius, ambassadors of Christ to the Czechs. They brought the story of the Cross to these people in their own tongue, and Cyril wrote out the Gospel for them that they might read it for themselves. Because they had no alphabet, Cyril made one for them, and invented [3/4] quaint letters which helped out the Greek alphabet to express Slavic sounds. Today the Cyrillic alphabet is universal in Eastern Europe, and is familiar to most of us in Russian print. This conversion of the Czechs occurred in the year 860.
Greek, not Roman
German missionaries representing the Church of Rome, had, before that, tried to convert the Czechs in Bohemia, but even at that early date Czechs and Germans found themselves inexorably and permanently opposed. So in Bohemia and Moravia were established Greek rather than Roman rites and doctrines. The gift of the Roman mind is law and the duty of submission to authority, while the Greek mind offers to the world the freedom of the human soul; this is true even in the Christian Church. So the gift of the Church of Rome through German missionaries, the Czechs flung back, and turned with joy to spiritual liberty and living faith which the Eastern Church brought them.
Revolt--John Ziska
War flamed up in Bohemia, and four great German armies marched upon the Czechs at intervals of two or three years, only to be hurled back utterly defeated by the Czech armies led by Ziska, one of the most picturesque figures in all history. An old man, short and broad, with long, slender nose and a fierce red moustache, blind in one eye, over which he wore a patch, he called himself "John Ziska of the Chalice, commander in the Hope of God." The people were fighting for their religious liberty, for the free reading of the Holy Bible, for the receiving of the chalice by the lay people in the Holy Communion, so that the chalice became their standard, and they wore it embroidered on their banners and tunics. In the year 1436, antedating the Reformation in the Church of England by a century, Christendom accredited to the Czechs a national Church, independent and self-organized, with bishops, priests and deacons, possessing an inherent vitality. The people sang themselves into religious fervor, and transformed the ancient Greek Church custom of singing Easter hymns, [5/6] into singing hymns the year round. Nothing like it had been known before in the world. Little do we think as we sing hymn after hymn in church and at home, whence came this gift to Christendom. The hymn, "Christ the Lord is risen again," is one of the Czech Easter hymns. Not a Roman priest was to be found in Bohemia or Moravia, and only the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 prevented reunion with the Greek Church.