John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers/Chapter 12
CHAPTER XII.
THE DECISIVE STEP.
HE great Schism in the Roman Church, followed by a double line of Popes between the years 1378 and 1415, and the division of Christendom into two camps, with two hostile Supreme Pontiffs and Vicars of Christ, was evidently a more injurious fact for Rome and for Christianity than the long sojourn of the Papacy in its "Babylonian Captivity." The latter fact had in itself been sufficiently discrediting, for, though force took the Popes to Avignon, it was demoralisation rather than force which kept them there. But the Schism was infinitely worse than the Captivity.
It only needed a strong and startling situation such as that which was produced by this Schism to strengthen the convictions and courage of the Oxford Reformers, and to guarantee the continuance of the revolt against Rome. For twenty-seven years the rulers of the Western Church fought their daily battle against catholicity and authority. The Schism began, continued, and ended in fatal hostility to the unity of Christendom. Gregory, whose bad choice of time and means for the return to Rome was the immediate cause of the disaster,[1] had inaugurated a persecution which ultimately led up to the secession of the Teutonic Churches. The Council of Constance, summoned in order to bring the Schism to an end, cemented a new union with the blood of Huss and Jerome, and signalised it by the desecration of Wyclif's grave.
Gregory died, as we have seen, within a few months of his ill-timed return to the Holy City. There were sixteen cardinals at Rome, most of them Frenchmen; but under pressure from the turbulent citizens they elected an Italian to the vacant see. Part of the papal Court had remained at Avignon, and in a fatal moment they resolved to choose a French Pontiff, and to ignore the Roman selection. National jealousies, to which the Popes had so often appealed, declared themselves once more. Urban VI. was recognised by England, most of the Empire, Hungary, Bohemia, and Italy; whilst Clement VII. secured the allegiance of France, the Spanish kingdoms, Savoy, and a few of the German states. The appointment of a French rival drew away from Rome all the cardinals who were of French origin, and Urban immediately created twenty-six more. He is said to have offered the hat to Bishop Courtenay amongst others; but Courtenay probably remembered the fate of Archbishop Langham twenty years ago, and preferred the reversion of the English primacy to a forced residence at Rome.
The long and lamentable story of the papal Schism, of the bloodshed and abominations of various kinds to which it gave birth, and of the effect which it produced on the Western Churches, has often been written. It is necessary to a good understanding of any epoch of ecclesiastical history, at any rate within fifty years of the fatal dissension, that the reader should see each particular event in the strong relief created by this pontifical rivalry, as against the lurid and glaring background of a coarsely painted picture. The battles of the Popes and the recriminations of their supporters were daily present in the minds and ears of all men, dominating everything which they thought and said and did. Foxe cites in his own language a passage from one of the many histories which had even then been written on the subject: "As touching the pestilent and most miserable Schisme, it would require heere another Iliade to comprehend in order all the circumstances and tragic all parts thereof, what trouble in the whole Church, what parts taken in every countrey, what apprehending and imprisoning of priests and prelates, taken by land and sea, what shedding of blood did follow thereof. . . what cardinals were racked and miserablie without all mercy tormented on gibbets to death, what slaughter of men, what battles were fought between the two Popes, whereof five thousand on the one side were slaine."
Whilst the whole Church was scandalised by these disorders, Wyclif was living a comparatively quiet life at Oxford and Lutterworth, and devoting himself to congenial but arduous labours. So far as can be accurately ascertained, he produced a large majority of his works, and nearly all his English works, in the last six years of his life. It was indeed the four years from 1378 to 1382 which in all probability saw the publication of the English Bible, the sermons, one or two of the more interesting Latin works, and a series of English tracts, in which he maintained his unorthodox opinions with greater vigour than ever; and it was now for the first time that he began to express doubts of the accepted theory of transubstantiation. This particular error, more grievous to the orthodox people of his day than any other which is attributed to him, was not one of the conclusions enumerated in the papal bulls, as it certainly would have been if he had given his enemies the slightest pretext for laying it to his charge. But in 1382 it was placed, in the front of his fresh condemnation by Courtenay, and he had probably given utterance to it several years before that—certainly, as we shall see, in 1381.
It was one of the regular diversions of the orthodox in those days, and indeed for two or three generations afterwards, to count up the heresies of John Wyclif; and, as Thomas Fuller drily says, they were 
ARCHBISHOP ARUNDEL.
FROM AN OLD PORTRAIT IN LAMBETH PALACE.
like the stones on Salisbury Plain, concerning which there is a proverb that no two men can count them alike. Thus Pope Gregory in his bulls made them come to nineteen. Courtenay advanced upon that number in 1382; and Archbishop Arundel strikes one as remarkably moderate in stopping short at twenty-three errors, of which he reckons only ten as actually heretical. Nevertheless an Oxford.Committee under his auspices, a quarter of a century after Wyclif's death, discovered as many as two hundred and sixty-seven. The Council of Constance enumerated forty-five; and not long after this Netter of Walden arrives at a round fourscore. The orthodox of Bohemia had a still keener scent, for John Lücke jumped up to two hundred and sixty-six, whilst Cocleus (who wrote a history of the Hussites) detected no fewer than three hundred and three.
No one helped so much to build up Wyclifs reputation as the enemies who tried to write him down; and these lists of his heresies are really very convenient records for such as wish to see the more characteristic opinions of the Reformer concisely stated. If we take Netter's list as it stands, and bear in mind that it is in the nature of a series of allegations made by a writer in the reign of Henry V., who distinctly regarded Wyclif as a mischievous heretic, we shall at any rate know the worst that was brought against him.
According to this authority, Wyclif held and taught that it is blasphemy to call any man Head of the Church save Christ alone; or that Peter had greater power than the other apostles; or that Rome was the appointed seat of Christ's Vicar; or that the Pope is to be considered as the successor of Peter, except in so far as he imitates Peter and Christ. The infallibility of the Church of Rome in matters of faith is the greatest blasphemy of Antichrist. Wyclif called the Pope Antichrist, and "the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place"; but with respect to this common charge levelled against him by his enemies it may be observed that, though he was wont now and then to apply a hard term to the doer of a wrong action, hypothetically and indirectly, he nowhere says "Gregory is Antichrist," or "Urban is Antichrist." What he said, and said strongly because his convictions were strong, every one of his critics must have said if they could have been taken logically over the intermediate steps. But let us continue the record of heresy according to Netter.
The benedictions, confirmations, consecrations of churches and chalices, and other such acts of the bishops, [when done at a price, and treated as contributing to the incomes of rich men], are mere "tricks to get money." Plain deacons or priests may lawfully preach without having the licence of Pope or bishop. A bishop is not apostolically different from a priest. Absolution [depends entirely on repentance, and] may be pronounced by a layman as well as by a priest. The clergy ought not to be prevented from marrying [but celibacy is the highest kind of life]. Priests of evil life cease to be effective priests [but Wyclif said: "A cursed man doth fully the sacraments, though it be to his own damning; for they be not authors of these sacraments, but God keepeth that divinity to himself"]. The Church consists only of such as are predestinated. The Church had no immovable goods before the time of Constantine; and it is no sacrilege for the State to take for its own needs the temporal goods of the Church. There is a savour of hypocrisy in the beautiful buildings and decorations of the Church. Tithes are to be considered as pure alms, and ought not to be extorted by censures; parishioners would do well not to pay tithe at all to dissolute priests. Whatever is not plainly expressed and enjoined in the Scriptures is irrelevant and impertinent. Many of the ecclesiastical teachers since the completion of the first millennium of Christianity were heretical. It is vain for laymen to bargain for the prayers of priests. There is no superiority in set prayers repeated by a priest; men should trust rather in personal holiness. The alms of the Church should be refused to persons living in open sin.
With regard to the sacraments, it was alleged against Wyclif that he spoke slightingly of the act of chrism, and denied the absolute necessity of baptism, which, he said, does not confer grace, but only symbolises a grace given before. It is idolatry to worship the host; the bread and wine remain just what they were before consecration. God could not make his natural body exist in two places at once. Confirmation is not necessary to salvation. Confession of sins to a priest is superfluous for a contrite man. Extreme unction is unnecessary, and not a sacrament.
All kinds of religious Orders confound the unity of the Church of Christ, who instituted but one Order, the Order of service. Vows of virginity are a doctrine of devils; and the worship of saints borders on idolatry. It is needless to visit the shrines of saints; the miracles alleged to be performed there may be only delusions of the devil. It is lawful to appeal in ecclesiastical matters and matters of faith to the secular prince. All dominion is founded on grace, and God divests of all right the rulers who abuse their power. Christ was a man, and his manhood should receive the kind of worship which is known as "latreia"—that is, the worship of service and observance. God loved David and Peter as deeply when they grievously sinned as he does now, when they are possessed of glory. God gives no good things to his enemies; and he is not more willing to reward the good than he is to punish the wicked. All things come to pass by a fatal necessity. God could not have made the world other than it is made; and he cannot make that which is something return to nothing—a fatalism which leads up to the paradox that God must "obey" the devil.
It is evident in how many points Wyclif set up a standard for the Reformers who came after him, and especially for the Calvinists, Presbyterians, and Puritans. The reader will not need to be reminded that some of the opinions ascribed to him by those who considered him a dangerous heretic may be no more than their own interpretation of his casual expression of opinion, whilst all of them, as quoted above, are torn from their context, and not one of them could be accepted as accurate without verification from Wyclif's own writings. Even without such a deduction in his favour from the allegations of Netter, there is very little in the record which was not frankly adopted and endorsed by the Reformed Church in the sixteenth century; but, if the common belief of Romanists in the fourteenth century is taken as the standard of orthodoxy, then no doubt Wyclifs opinions must be admitted to have been steeped in the rankest heresy. And, even if we agree with every one of the conclusions attributed to him, our judgment to-day might be fairly expressed in the terms employed by the University of Oxford in response to Pope Gregory's bull—that the conclusions are true, and essentially orthodox, but framed in such a way as to leave room for misconceptions.
The denial of transubstantiation was the special cause of proceedings taken against the Reformer in 1381 and 1382, of which we shall have to speak further on. It is, however, pertinent to the present phase of his development—in the years 1378 to 1380—to quote what was said of him by Wodeford, whose words are cited by Dr. Shirley from a Latin manuscript in the Bodleian Library. "So long as Wyclif was 'sententiarius,' and even 'baccalaurius responsalis'[2] he openly and in the schools maintained that, although the sacramental accidents rested upon some substance, yet in the act of consecration the material bread had ceased to exist. Pressed by many questions as to what was the subject of those accidents, he began by replying, for some considerable time, that it was a mathematical body.' Later on, in consequence of many arguments urged against this, he would reply that he did not know what was the substance of the accidents; but he was firm as to their resting upon some substance. Now (that is, in 1381) in his conclusions and in his confession he expressly declares that the bread remains after the consecration, and that it is the substance of the accidents."
Nothing, surely, could be more eloquent of the moral struggle through which Wyclif had been passing, and was yet to pass, on a subject which has in all ages been the most searching and serious that can possibly engage the mind of a devout Christian transcendentalist. He had begun his life, so soon as his reasoning faculties had asserted themselves, with the familiar "late Roman" separation of the accidents from the substance or subject. For him, however, the essence of the sacrament was in the words of Christ, and in the act of faith which enabled him to see the body and blood of Christ; but, if he saw, it was with the eye of faith, and not with the physical sight. That was his first step—and already he was a heretic in comparison with those who declared that they saw a physical Christ with physical sight. The man of comfortable faith looked upon the bread and reverently declared: "I see no bread—it has gone though it has not disappeared. I see the physical body of Christ, wearing the shape of bread; but it is only because of my infirmity that it seems to be what it is not—seems to be wheaten bread when it is actually and really my Lord and God."
To Wyclif, even as a young man, this savoured of idolatry. In vain his friends would assure him that it was no idolatry, but the very sublimity of faith. "I grant," he began by saying, "that the substance is altered. The 'hoc est corpus'. enables me to see the body of Christ—a spiritual body, seen with spiritual eyes. But what, then, do I see with my physical sight? I am a realist; I see a body, with attributes and mathematical dimensions—but what body? No longer a mathematical body, you say, if the consecration has annihilated all the mathematical and physical qualities of wheaten bread? Then I cannot tell you what the body is, but sure I am that a body is there. To say that it is physically God is idolatry. To say, as some of us do, that what I see and handle are accidents without a subject is only another way of saying that the 'hoc est corpus,' which made Christ visible to the eye of faith, also made that wheaten bread into something infinitely inferior in the scale of nature—lower than the peasant's bean-bread, lower than the soil in which the grain of wheat germinated; for they have substance as well as accidents, but this unhappy phenomenon retains its accidents after losing its substance."
Such, in part, was to be his reasoning in 1381, when he had pronounced his "eureka," and committed himself to what was deemed the most pestilent of his heresies. In 1378, when he came back to Oxford to ruminate on the meaning and the riddle of his life—condemned by the Pope, condemned by the Primate and the Bishop of London, a byword amongst the monks and friars, distrusted henceforth by all who looked to Pope and bishops as authoritative exponents of the faith—he had not yet brought himself to utter the answer which must have trembled on his lips. But there, in the home of his youth and manhood, he nursed the secret of his soul. He taught in the schools with increasing zeal, preached and wrote in English, at Oxford and at Lutterworth, with feverish activity, and passed, perhaps, some of the happiest and yet the saddest moments of his life with the friends who loved him so well—with Nicholas Hereford and Laurence Bedenham, with Rygge and Repyngdon, with John Aston and Flemmyng, with John Purvey, William Jamys, and many others. They used to call him Johannes Augustini, as well as the Evangelical Doctor, and they were brave enough to bear with him the suspicion and obloquy which were his lot. But the worst days of his persecution were yet to come.
It is told of Jamys that in a sermon before Chancellor Berton—somewhat later than the time we are now considering—he made use of the expression, "There is no idolatry if not in the sacrament of the altar." Whereon the Chancellor broke in with a sarcastic comment. "Jam loqueris ut philosophus!"—"Now you are talking like the philosopher!" And if Wyclif was present, doubtless the eyes of all were turned upon him, for they knew whose feather had impelled that shaft. The story is sometimes told as referring to Rygge instead of Berton, in which case the Chancellor's remark would bear another meaning. But it is unlikely that a Chancellor would have broken into a public discourse with emphatic approval of a statement which must have given offence to many of the congregation.
It was in every way a stirring and creative time. The papal Schism had thrown all Christendom into extraordinary ferment, and men had scarcely ranged themselves on their respective sides. It was not until near the end of 1379, eighteen months after the Neapolitan Archbishop and the French Cardinal had placed their rival claims before the Western Churches,that England definitely declared for Urban; but to support the pretensions of one Pope in preference to those of another was not sufficient to set the mind at rest concerning the very disturbing fact of the Schism itself. Wyclif, in common with many a devout Christian at that crisis, was very deeply affected by the events which were occurring day by day.
In connection with the sympathy felt for Wyclif by his own University, it would of course be a mistake to suppose that he was primarily or principally responsible for Oxford's departures from orthodoxy in the fourteenth century. To think that would be to make nothing of the influence of other inquiring minds amongst the Schoolmen, the lay graduates, and even the friars. We have seen already that there were some very liberal-minded men amongst the Franciscans in particular; and as a matter of fact we find traces of "grievous errors" at Oxford before Wyclif came to maturity, and even before he was born. If some of these errors were identical with errors that Wyclif subsequently held, the fair conclusion is that he imbibed them at Oxford as part of the mental sustenance which had proved to be best adapted to his intellectual growth and needs.
Archbishop Langham(1366-1368), who had been a monk, and was notoriously hostile to the mendicant Orders, wrote in the course of his primacy a disciplinary letter to Oxford in which he drew attention to the unsound views at that time current in the University. He mentioned a number of these—as that the baptism of infants is not a necessity for salvation; that no one could justly suffer damnation for original sin alone, without the reinforcement of wilful sin after birth; that there is a sufficient "remedy in nature" for the sins of true believers; that no one could be justly deprived of his heavenly inheritance for sins committed without a clear vision of God; that every human being has at least one clear vision of God before his death; that mere prohibition of an act is not sufficient to constitute the commission of that act a sin; that the Father in himself is finite, the Son finite, and the Holy Ghost alone infinite; that God cannot annihilate his creatures, or make something into nothing; that God cannot be a tormentor; that even Mary and the saints are still liable to sin and damnation; that, conversely, the damned are capable of salvation; that future punishments will not be everlasting; and that God could not create an absolutely impeccable being.
It is manifest that some of these tenets, sound or unsound, are at least as old as Christianity, whilst one or two belong to the class of what may be called logical hyperbole. Certainly Wyclif held many or most of them, but it is equally certain that he would have condemned others. There is indeed a strain of greater optimism in these earlier Oxford heresies than Wyclif's mood and experience permitted him to entertain. He was a predestinarian, a believer in that "foreknowledge" of damnation which so easily becomes foredooming to damnation. He believed so strongly in the potency of evil that he thought God himself was constrained by it, and accordingly he could scarcely hold that punishment was other than everlasting. These important points of divergence should be borne in mind by and by, when we come to the melancholy stage at which many of the Reformer's disciples fell away from him.
Wyclif's return to Oxford in 1378 coincided, by a curious chance, with a discovery made by certain devout Christians at Dundalk, that the bones of his old friend and master Fitzralph were endowed with the power of working miracles. He had expressed a general opinion that miracles of this kind, wrought at the tombs of the saints, were not unlikely to be delusions of the devil; but we may be sure that if he thought them possible in any case he would be disposed to accept the testimony of the pious in regard to the doughty old Archbishop of Armagh—the Armachanus who was already a great authority at Oxford when Wyclif went up, and who certainly left his mark on Wyclif's character and opinions. Wyclif speaks of him with affection and reverence, and evidently accepted from him as a bequest not merely his ideas of divine lordship but also his controversial antagonism to the friars.
The report of the Dundalk miracles, then, would come just in time to stimulate old enmity, to add fuel to the fire which had been kindled afresh by the papal bulls. The friars are said to have been much troubled by the report in question, for everyone knew how bitterly Fitzralph had opposed them, even at the Court of Avignon; and clearly, if he were accepted as a saint and a miracle-worker, there would be an ugly inference against themselves in the minds of the faithful. Of course they did not believe in the miracles, and it may be that they expressed themselves a little too plainly on the subject of their old enemy. Still nothing of this sort was needed to widen the breach between the four Orders and the man whom they had twice so nearly succeeded in crushing. An opportunity came which they might have turned to good account by effecting at least a partial reconciliation with their antagonist; but they attempted to get too much out of it, and the only consequence was that they made matters worse than ever.
Early in 1379 Wyclif had a severe and even dangerous illness. It may have been the result of the great mental and physical strain which had been put upon him in the previous year; and perhaps it was attended by certain premonitory symptoms of the collapse which was soon to overtake him. However that may be, he was thought to be at the end of his tether; and when the friars knew how hard it was going with him they resolved upon a curious course of proceeding.
Each of the four prominent Orders, Dominicans, Franciscans, Carmelites, and Augustinians, nominated a friar, being also a regent or doctor in divinity, to take part in a deputation to the dying heretic; and they took with them, not the viaticum, or any other of the consolations of religion, or even a skilled leech, but simply four aldermen of the city of Oxford. It is certainly not easy to understand the presence of those aldermen, unless they came with a genuine message of condolence, and the coincidence of their visit with that of the friars was merely accidental.
They began by wishing the sick man good health and a speedy recovery—and then told him that he was on the point of death, and asked him for a retractation of the hard things which he had said against them in his lifetime. It is impossible to fill in the details of what must have been a highly dramatic interview. If we even knew the names of the friars, it might assist us to a better understanding of the real object of their visit. It is doubtful if Wyclif was in a condition to answer them in the first instance, for he was too weak to raise himself in his bed. His visitors were thus able, without let or hindrance, to remind him of the heavy blows which he had dealt them, by word and writing; and they entreated him in his last moments, in presence of these worthy aldermen who might attest what he said, to display his penitence by formally withdrawing his charges against the Orders.
It was a bold thing to ask, even of a dying man; but it seemed to be just the stimulus which Wyclif wanted to enable him to throw off his lethargy. The emaciated frame and the lustreless eyes must have taken sudden fire from the soul within, for we are told that he called his servants to his side, ordered them to raise him on his pillows, and then cried out with unexpected vigour, "I will not die but live, and I will show up the evil deeds of the friars!"
He did live, for more than five years thereafter, and both he and the Orders gave and received many hard knocks. His first and main quarrel was with the false teaching and usurped authority of Rome; but he could never come to terms with the religious professors who had forsaken the rule of poverty in order to live delicately, to exercise dominion, to amass wealth, and to keep for themselves what had been given to them in trust for the poor. This is the note which prevails throughout his writings in relation to the mendicant Orders, and which he enforces in a hundred different ways.
Much of what Wyclif wrote, especially in his longer and more argumentative works, is almost unreadable for men and women of the present day, and serviceable perhaps for nothing so much as the elucidation of his character and work. After the lapse of five complete centuries, in every year of which the effect of his stainless and courageous life has been continuously operative in the cause of religious freedom, what the world wants to see and feel is not so much the quality of his controversial logic, or the exact conclusiveness of his somewhat ponderous and involved arguments—for which at best we are dependent on manifestly corrupt texts,—as the moral lineaments and effective force of the man himself. We want to know and be familiar with the John Wyclif who, in the days of our childhood was little more to any of us than the shadow of a great name: the John Wyclif who was Chaucer's contemporary under the Plantagenet kings; who in the Middle Ages of history moved as a star across the dark firmament of western Europe; a Schoolman, and yet a teacher of the most accepted Christianity of to-day. We want to feel sure, and we are only just beginning to feel it, that the man to whom every lover of truth is so largely indebted stands before us as a recognised presence and identity, in his form and substance as he lived; the brilliant Oxford man who paced the pavements of the schools, or haunted the streets and meadows between his college and the silver streams, passing the very spot where, two centuries later, bishops such as his soul would have loved were to light a candle for the faith as he believed it; the eager, busy optimist who threw himself into the eddies of English politics, hoping against hope that the secular arm would strike effectively where he saw such urgent need; the pale, weak priest, with firm-set lips and undaunted eyes, to whom the re-discovered truth was a mastering reality, far above the authority of Rome or the claims of tradition.
To read the controversial works of Wyclif without some such intimate and sympathetic realisation of his character is to make no near approach to a knowledge of the man, and very little towards the comprehension of his life-work. To the merely critical mind, for instance, which is governed by our actual canons of literary taste and amenity, and forgets to transpose the language of the fourteenth century into the same key with that of the nineteenth, the tone occasionally adopted by Wyclif in his later years against the Papacy and the religious Orders may well seem to pass the bounds of moderation.
One or two quotations have already been given from the sermons of Wyclif in which the unworthiness of Christian professors was severely castigated. Other discourses will be found in the same collection which were written after the Schism, in some of which the writer declares his belief that the friars are mainly actuated by greed, and that they would easily change from Urban to Clement if such a course were likely to be more profitable. In another sermon he charges them with obstructing the Poor Priests, who interfered with their gains. In the Vae Octuplex, which is found in all the best manuscripts of Wyclif's sermons, and has always been attributed to him, the eight woes pronounced against the Scribes and Pharisees are brought home to the Church of the second millennium, and especially to the friars. This indeed is Wyclif's prevailing note in all his denunciations—that the errors of the Church have invaded her only "since the fiend was loosed."
Under the lash of such a tongue, no wonder if the friars, the monks and the wealthier clergy had become at first restive, then indignant, then bitterly and vindictively hostile to the most uncompromising of their cen ors. His invective was certainly not of the mildest kind, and even his friends have occasionally lamented the stern and sweeping character of the charges which he brought against the regular and higher secular clergy. Wyclif himself would have admitted that there were priests, regulars, and perhaps even bishops who did not deserve to be branded as corrupt. A man of milder (perhaps less effective) temperament might have dwelt upon these exceptions, and have been more on his guard against the misconceptions which arose out of his too comprehensive reproaches. Possibly it never occurred to him to say anything so fatuous as that the censure of greed and hypocrisy must not be held to apply to such as are neither greedy nor hypocritical. The fourteenth century, it must be remembered, was not a time of mincing words, halting controversies, and compromises which sacrifice nine points of a just demand in order to secure the tenth. Wyclif was thoroughly a man of his century—a leader and a pioneer, it is true, but still a man of limited knowledge, only half liberated from the scholastic yoke, conventional in his dialectical methods, and one who was too much attached to logical precision—and perhaps to logical hyperbole—to think much of the weaker and illogical minds which would be disturbed by his confident conclusions.
It is natural that a secular clergyman holding such views as Wyclif held, and expressing them with increasing freedom during the last few years of his life, should have been charged with the very offences against which he most indignantly protested. His enemies did not fail to say that his rage against the monks and friars was not very pronounced until Archbishop Langham in 1366 had deprived him of the wardenship of Canterbury Hall, and put back the regulars in place of the seculars—events which, in all probability, had no reference at all to our John Wyclif. In any case the question would seem to be not so much when Wyclif's rage was hottest as whether he was hot with good reason.
Another accusation brought against him by the friars and their friends, after he was dead, represented him as having tried in vain to secure a nomination to the see of Worcester—the inference being that his attacks upon the wealthy clergy who mis-used their wealth, and upon the rapidly increasing endowments of the Church, grew out of this check to his worldly ambitions. No candid reader of the life and writings of Wyclif will give a second thought to these charges of hypocrisy and greed, stamped as they are by their patent absurdity.
To admit that the Reformer's hostility to the abuses of the monastic system, and his condemnation of a wealthy priesthood, were not openly displayed until he had felt the smart of personal disappointment would be to ignore the note of continuity which is manifest throughout his intellectual history. If there is any force at all in what has been said of Wyclif's mental and moral descent from the liberal Schoolmen, and especially from his immediate predecessor William of Ockham, it follows as a matter of course that he began his career as a clergyman with a profound belief in the doctrine of evangelical poverty, and did not wait until he was more than forty years old before he gave it public utterance. At any rate his tongue was specially unloosed against the friars after the death of Fitzralph in 1360; and though, like the Archbishop of Armagh, he had never held the extreme doctrine of evangelical poverty as it stood condemned in the decretals—based on the assertion that Christ himself had begged instead of working for his living—still his advance on Fitzralph's position was enough to prove that Wyclif was not fishing for preferment. To say, as his greatest enemies said, that he inherited the damnable doctrines of Marsiglio was to say that he was in sympathy with the Fraticelli and the Brotherhood of Munich, that he accepted from his boyhood the whole theory of a spiritual Church, free from worldly titles or claims, and that the logical indefensibility of Church endowments was one of the grounding principles of his belief.
If other reasons were needed to show how untenable is the notion that Wyclif began to condemn endowments in 1363 or 1368—the see of Worcester fell vacant at both these dates,—because he had angled for a bishopric without success, it might be enough to point out that his actions and utterances, so far as we are acquainted with them, were consistently of such a character as to militate against the chance of his receiving any sort of preferment in the Church; that his association with John of Gaunt, who had been credited with a desire to spoliate the Church, would have been the last thing to suggest itself to an orthodox clergyman in search of a mitre; that, on the other hand, his attendance upon the King, the repute of his preaching in London, his dealings with the Duke of Lancaster and the Prince of Wales, the frequent recourse of Parliament to his opinion and advice, say between 1366 and 1380, would have sufficed to obtain him a bishopric if he had been laying himself out to secure one—if he had economised his liberalism instead of speaking his mind and eventually disregarding the wishes of the Duke on a question of principle; and that, in point of fact, when the sinecure prebend of Aust was conferred upon him in 1375, on his return from Bruges, he conscientiously declined it.
The friars, as we shall see, had by no means shot their last bolt; but up to the year 1380, at any rate, Wyclif had the best of the argument in every sense. The comparative success of his attack upon the Roman system in England, as well as upon the alien Orders and the national hierarchy, is sufficiently accounted for by the organic weakness of Rome in the fourteenth century, by the patriotic resistance of Englishmen to encroachments from a vassal of France, and by the revulsion of public feeling against ecclesiastical and monastic scandals. Historians who were prejudiced in favour of the papal cause—and it is to be remembered that men like Netter, Harpsfield, and even the Dominicans who confuted Wyclif after his death, had the making of his history in their own hands—admit that the provisions and other exactions of Rome went a long way towards ensuring him the measure of success which he actually gained.
- ↑ The Schism might have been averted if Gregory had refused to migrate without the entire body of the College of Cardinals. He allowed himself to be hurried to Rome by Catherine of Siena.
- ↑ "Sententiarius," one who lectured on the "Sentences," so as to qualify for the degree of B.D. "Baccalaurius responsalis" a B.D. of two years' standing. So far as is known, Wyclif was a B.D. as early as 1363.