Gregory

Gregory the patriarch of the Bonemian Brethren. Among the earnest-minded Hussites of the Calixtine party, which began, about 1453, to form around Rokycan, elected but never consecrated archbishop of Prague, and to listen with enthusiasm to his sermons on the necessity of a reformation, the most prominent was Gregory, surnamed "the Patriarch." The time and place of his birth are unknown. He was the son of a Bohemian knight, and the nephew of Rokycan, whose sister was his mother. Disappointed in his uncle, who was not willing to be a reformer practically however much he theorized on the subject, he retired, with a number of his friends, to the barony of Lititz, and there founded in 1457 the Church of the Bohemian Brethren, or Unitas Fratrum. Accepting no ecclesiastical office in the same, he remained merely a lay elder, but was the life and soul of the organization. In its interests he wrote and published many letters, doctrinal treatises, and apologetic works, nearly all of which have perished. His doctrinal tendencies were derived mainly from Peter Chelcicky, a Bohemian writer, who inveighed with stern rigor, from out of an isolated retreat, against the corruptness of that age. (For particulars about Chelcicky, see Gillette's article on the Taborites and the Germ of the Moravian Church, in the Presbyterian Review of July 1864.). In consequence, his views of Christian discipline grew to be extreme, and more than puritanical. These he impressed upon the Church. Some of their most salient points were the following men of rank must strip themselves of the same, and lay down every worldly office, before they can be received into the Church. no member is allowed to go to law, or to testify before a civil court; judicial oaths.are forbidden; no member may keep an inn, or engage in any trade calculated to advance luxury. His object was to preserve the Church unspotted from the world, amid the fearful degeneracy which prevailed. At the time of his death; which occurred in 1473, at Brandeis, on the Adler, in Bohemia, these and other similar regulations were in full force. Twenty-one years later, however, in 1494, they were formally abrogated, and a more liberal policy was introduced. In the first persecution (1461) which came upon the Brethren, Gregory was frightfully torturedon the rack. — Palacky's Geschichte ron. Bohmen, volume 6, chapter 7, which work denies that Gregory was the nephew of Rokycan; Gindely's Geschichte der Bohmischen Bruder, volume 1, chapter 1-3 Cröger's Geschichte der alten Bruiderkirche, volume 1, chapter 3; Benham's Notes on the Origin and Episcopate of the Bohemian Brethren, pages 1-120. (E. de S.)