ar 14548 LIF^S Place IN History PROF. MONTAGU BURROWS Cornell University Library arV14548 Wiclif's place in Wstorji': 3 1924 031 388 279 olin.anx Cornell University Library The original of tliis bool< is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924031388279 WICLIF'S PLACE IN HISTORY WICLIFS PLACE IN HISTORY '^^ttz Hjctures Delivered before the University of Oxford in i88i BY MONTAGU BURROWS, M.A. CHICHELE PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY, AUTHOR OF *' PARLIAMENT AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND ' LONDON Wm. ISBISTER, Limited 56, LUDGATE HILL 1882 A. r9^3 ."v^ ^^"^^ . . vVhite PEEFACE. These Lectures owe their origin to the visit of the late Dr. Gather to Oxford in 1879. He had for years devoted himself to the task of stirring up the public mind to some enthusiasm on the subject of Wiclif's memory ; and it was mainly to his exertions that Quincentenary commemorations were held in the above and preceding years at London, Dublin, and elsewhere. He hoped, with the assistance of members of the University, to hold some such Wiclif comme- moration at Oxford, but it was put off to another year. Meanwhile this excellent man died of a bronchial attack, brought on by his exertions in the cause. It must be confessed that there did not seem to be much heart at Oxford for the proposed celebration ; but it is possible that this lukewarmness might have been more the result of a want of accurate know- ledge than anything else. That defect was cer- tainly shared by the present Lecturer, who soon discovered how unsatisfactory were all the usual sources of information on the subject. He can only VI PREFACE. claim for these Lectures that they are the fruit of an honest attempt to understand the many problems which gather round the career of Wiclif. It will be observed that no one of the authors cited is implicitly followed ; for no one of them can be exempted from independent criticism. Perhaps Dr. Gather aimed at too much when he pleaded for commemorations of particular events in different years of the life of the great Reformer. Is it not possible that the country might yet, in the course of the next two or three years, become sufficiently interested in this extraordinary man to encourage some more general demonstration of respect and admiration than has yet taken place, a demonstration which would appropriately connect itself with the year of his death, 1384 ? Oxford, Christmas, 1881. CONTENTS. LECTURE PAGE I. — THE HISTORY AND PKESENT STATE OF THE WlCLlr LITEKATUKE . . 1 II. — ■WICllP S PKEPARATION, — AT OXl'OHD ANP IN RELATION TO PARLIAMENT . . .... 41 til. — wicLir'e work; his final connection with oxford AND HIS TRUE PLACE AS A HEFORMER . . .81 EREATA. Page 12, line 5 from bottom; for "movements" read " movement." ,, 25, line 2 from bottom ; for " Reformation which " read " Reformers who." ,, 55, line 18 ; /or " St. Frideswide's " read "Christ- church, Canterbury." ,, 56, line 1 ; for " St. Frideswide's " read " Canter- bury." ,, 56, line 2 ; erase " at their very gates." ,, 73, line 10 ; for "which' he adopted" read "with which he was oftenest identified." „ 100, line 8 ; for " as " read " than." „ 119, line 7 from bottom ; after " corruptions " insart "of the Church." ,, „ line 8 from bottom ; for " its " read " the." „ 123, line 8; after " by " insert " effective." ,, 126, line 16 ; for " masters " read " seniors." ,, 128, line 11 ; before " four " insert " last." LECTUEE I. THE HISTORY AND PRESENT STATE OF THE WIGLIF LITERATURE. In this University it would be unnatural to begin a review of tbe history of the Wiclif Literature without referring to one familiar name. Twenty-three years ago the only Oxford man who had in modern times made, as far as we know, a real study of "Wiclif, Dr. Shirley, Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History, died early in life, and just when he seemed to be about to do great things. His present reputation rests, and deserves to rest, on the advance he made beyond his predecessors in the classification of Wiclif 's works, and on the Preface which he prefixed to the "Fasciculi Zizaniorum," the collection of documents which he edited in 1858 for the Master of the Rolls. That Preface was but a fragment, but it attracted an atten- tion far beyond what might have been expected from its bulk. It was to have been followed by a complete edition of Wiclif 's EngKsh works, and by a digest of his life and opinions, which would no doubt have been extremely valuable. Some of these works have, since Dr. Shirley's death, been printed, in accordance with his wish, by the TJniver- B 2 LECTURE I. sity Press, and edited by Mr. Thomas Arnold; some others have seen the light within the last few months under the auspices of Mr. Matthew and the Early English Text Society. All this is valuable work ; and Mr. Matthew's Preface is a distinct gain. But the full estimate of Wiclif 's historical position has been made by no English hand. Like many other things which we should have done ourselves, it has been left to the Germans, among whom Professor Lechler, of Leipsic, must be especially mentioned. Utilising with great skill the labours of Dr. Vaughan, Dr. Shirley, and others, he has given us a most laborious and scientific treatment of the subject in all its various bear- ings, and he has fortunately found an excellent editor and translator into English in Dr. Peter Lorimer. He also writes from the elevated stand-point of one who has studied Wiclif's great series of Latin manu- scripts, still lying unprinted in the Imperial Library at Vienna. It is, indeed, perfectly certain that a final estimate of the opinions and position of the man can never be attained until we have the whole of his writings before us, until the difficult process of sifting out the spurious works attributed to him has been completed, and until their chronological sequence has been determined by the critical examination of several competent scholars. But enough has been already done to demand a notice in this University, and to afford a fair assurance that we shall not have to retrace our steps in any such way as to make our present work a waste of time. And the circumstances of the case admit of no delay. ERRORS OF MODERN WRITERS. 3 Let any one who has surveyed the field of knowledge even now available for students of the Wiclif Literature look round him at the numerous English books which, in some form or other, undertake to deal with the subject. He cannot but observe that both the admirers of the Reformer, even the most industrious, and those who detest his memory, even the least unfair, have been the victims of the obscurity which has hitherto enshrouded the mighty dead. They have groped about in a most dim and confused light. They have had at their service only portions of the Reformer's works, and they have based their estimate on writings which are not his own. They have too often grounded opinions on isolated passages, and even these in the distorted form of " Articles '' unfairly extracted from his writings by some Synod or Council bent on procuring his condemnation. These defi- ciencies are most conspicuous in the sketches which appear in our modern summary histories, but they may be more or less generally traced everywhere. Too often, indeed, the public has been at the mercy of those who have used the opportunity to convey their own opinions in the accounts they have given us of one whose distant orbit places him beyond the range of ordinary observation, though that difficulty has been far from restraining observers within the modest limits of assertion which befit the circumstances. Nor has this absence of materials been the only difficulty. We are only of late beginning to under- stand that the contempt and ridicule which it has been so much the fashion to visit upon the Scholastic + LECTURE I. Philosophy of the Middle Ages, should at least be silent in reference to those statements of Wiclif s which are conveyed in language familiar enough in his day, and only obscure to our ignorance. Men forget that they are dealing with the foremost man of his University at one of its loftiest periods, the acknowledged representative of the greatness of GrrossetSste and Ockham, the man of whom his bitter contemporary opponent, Knighton, a most competent witness, confessed that he "came to be reckoned inferior to none of his time in philosophy, and incomparable in the performance of school exercises, a man of pro- found wit, and very strong and powerful in disputa- tions, and who was by the common sort of divines esteemed little less than a god." And if it is high time that some effort should be made to restore this extraordinary man to his true position with regard to the events of his age, no apology is necessary for making that effort at Oxford. Here, in this very place, under the shadow of buildings not even yet swept away, was, from five hundred to five hundred and fifty years ago, the home and centre of his wonderful career. Is it not from hence that one-sided and partial views of it should be corrected, undue depreciation exposed, the various phases of the storm which has for nearly all this time raged around his memory reduced, if the metaphor be allowed, to some atmospheric law ? Ought it not to be from hence that a fresh start should be made towards rehabilitating the character and position of one respecting whom some, at any rate, hold the deliberate OBSCURITY OF MEDIEVAL TIMES. s opinion that he stands at tlie very summit of the eminence which has been climbed throughout the ages by Oxford men ? At this place it ought not to be necessary, but perhaps even here it may be the best plan, to devote a few minutes to the history of the processes by which the world has come to such knowledge concerning Wiclif as it possesses. "We shall then, at any rate, be in a better position to comprehend how it is that such partial and contradictory views on the subject have found favour at various times, and how natural it is that the confusion should have lasted' down to our own day. The study of the Middle Ages has made some pro- gress of late years at Oxford. It will therefore require no elaborate argument to prove that we know exceedingly little about it. With the exception of Chaucer, no English writer of Wiclif's time is read by any but antiquarians. The difficulty of realising the world of the fourteenth century is still enormous. The whole fabric of the Mediaeval Church, in the midst of which Wiclif's career is enshrined, has undergone such vast changes that people are too apt to forget that there is any continuity between it and the present Church of England. The social and political life of our times stands as far removed from that obscure age as the literary and ecclesiastical life. No art of printing had as yet transmitted the form and pressure of the times. But still we have to account for something more than this difficulty of realising the distant and the 6 LECTURE I. dissimilar. We do not, for instance, experience it in forming our estimate of Alfred the Great, though double the number of centuries roll between us. Or if we require a better illustration, take the case of Wiclif's own contemporary, the great WilHam of "Wykeham ; how familiar do we at this place feel with him in comparison ! We seem to think with his thoughts, to live in his life ; but then he provided a continuous memorial in his magnificent colleges, and in the statutes which have protected and made them famous. His Quincentenary, celebrated of late with all pomp at New College, commanded eloquent eulogy, which passed with the whole country as perfectly appropriate ; yet who can doubt for a moment whether he or Wiclif deserves most the respect and admiration of the world ? Wykeham would certainly be unremembered as a divine or as a statesman, though he played his part on the political stage better than most of his contem- poraries. His modern fame is due to the wisdom and munificence with which he used the wealth derived from his numerous ecclesiastical preferments in the foundation of the first of our great Public Schools, and in the improvement and completion of the University College system, which had been originated by Walter de Merton. To Wiclif we owe, more than to any one person who can be mentioned, our English language, our English Bible, and our reformed religion. How easily the words slip from the tongue ! But is not this almost the very atmosphere we breathe? Expand that three- fold claim a little further. It means nothing less than WICLIF AND WFKEHAM. 7 this : — tliat in Wiclif we liaye tte acknowledged fatter of English prose, the first translator of the whole Bible into the language of the English people, the first dis- seminator of that Bible amongst all classes, the fore- most intellect of his times brought to bear upon the religious questions of the day, the patient and coura- geous writer of innumerable tracts and books, not for one, but for all the different classes of society, the sagacious originator of that whole system of ecclesi- astical reformation, which in its separate parts had been faintly shadowed forth by a genius here and there, but which ^acquired consistency in the hands of the master. By him and by those he had trained that Reformation was so firmly planted that it took deep root in the land, and after giving the impulse to similar and later movements on the continent, issued at last in the great system under which we live, one almost identical with that of the Rector of Lutter- worth, who died a century and a half before his work had fulfilled its appointed results. "Wiclif founded no colleges, for he had no means ; no human fabric enshrines his ideas ; no great institution bears his name. The country for which he lived and died is only beginning to wake up to a sense of the debt it owes his memory. And yet so vast is that debt, so overpowering the claim, even when thus briefly summarised, that it might be thought no very extravagant recognition if every town in England had a monument to his memory, and every- university a college named in his honour. It is something to be thankful for that a private Theological Hall, bear- 8 LECTURE I. ing that illustrious name, has been recently built in our suburbs. It will then be at once admitted that Wiclif 's repu- tation has in England by no means kept pace with the modern revival of historical activity. How has his name so strangely dropped out of the place which it should have occupied ? How is it that it has taken five centuries to advance so far as even to make the modest claim for his commemoration which a few persons have ventured of late to press upon the public ? This may well precede aU other questions. The primary cause must be looked for in the resolute, persistent, and successful efforts of the ecclesiastics of the unreformed Church to brand the memory of the Reformer with the fatal stigma of " heresy," and, acting under the orders of Synods and Councils, to destroy every vestige of his writings on which they could lay hands. And here let us avoid a too common error. We are not at this distance of time to imitate the spirit shown by the ecclesiastics of Wiclif's age by speaking of their conduct as if we should have acted differently. That way of speaking has of itself obstructed progress by the unfavourable impression it has produced on fair-minded men. Consider what a portent this Oxford Doctor (or Professor, as he virtually was) must have appeared in the fourteenth century, attacking from his chair, close to this very spot, every portion of the existing Church system, from the Pope at the head to the friar at the foot, not with the vulgar weapons of reckless fanaticism sharpened upon popular WICLIF BRANDED WITH " HERESY:' g prejudice, still less with the weapons of professed un- orthodox sentiment, but with the well-tempered steel of philosophical reasoning, based on an appeal to the Scrip- tures and the Primitive Church, and invested with the defensive panoply of a strictly moral, industrious, self- sacrificing, courageous life. It was no mere University student, no mere learned writer, no fanatic summoning men to come out from an accursed Church and become schismatics. It was the one wise and prudent man on whom kings, princes, and Parliaments relied in their struggles for national liberty, calling upon Churchmen to reform their abuses from within. It was the independent inquirer beseeching njen to consider what the Fathers of the First Ages had taught, and resolutely insisting on that incorporate' union between religion and mora- lity, which the corrupt customs and institutions of medisevalism had so grievously obscured. "Was it wonderful that these customs and institutions, hallowed by the support of good men, each portion of the system having been commenced with applause by the genera- tion which seemed to witness for its necessity, should appeal for protection against the ruthless destroyer ? Even minds candid enough to receive some rays of light might well have failed to perceive in what quarter a substitute for the denounced system was to be found. It is easy enough to forget how plain the road has been made for us by the rude but efEective processes of a later generation than that of Wiclif. Thus to the Church, impelled by wrath and terror, it became a necessity that the writings, and even the translated Bible, of the Eeformer, should, if possible, be 10 LECTURE 1. utterly suppressed. One or other must succumb. Either the Church must he reformed root and branch under this man's teaching, or there must be an entire obliteration of it. There was no middle course. They were suc- cessful just so far as this. The name of Wiclif was lost in the subsequent century, or only remembered in connection with what was thought disgraceful. That Wiclif's teaching was not wholly suppressed and overwhelmed, nay, that his work for the Church made progress underground, in spite of the hand of power, was due to the circumstance that he adopted the Divine model — to the poor the Gospel was preached. His " Poor Priests " (of whom more here- after) reached classes which were freer to receive im- pressions than the great and literary. His writings, laboriously copied, and all the more precious for the labour which no art of printing had yet facilitated, were treasured up in many a yeoman's farm, in many a labourer's cottage, and also in the halls of not a few sturdy knights and country gentlemen, who from their place in Parliament exercised some slight influence in mitigation of the wrath with which the new doctrines were assailed. The circulation was secret, a fruit the sweeter because forbidden by those against whose dictation men's consciences revolted ; it was influential on the middle class of the nation, not on its prominent men. The very name of the benefactor was, as perhaps he would himself have wished, forgotten in the doctrines which he had been the means of making known ; for the dangerous name was naturally omitted. Nor did the Renaissance, which shed such WICLIF DISCREDITED BY LOLLARDS, ii light on everything else, bring "Wiclif's name before the world. There was not a single work of his com- mitted to print till 1525, i.e. till after an interval of one hundred and forty-one years since his death, and eighty years after printing had been invented; and yet multitudes of books had already issued from the press. Nor was this first book, the " Trialogus," printed in England, but in Germany. Add to this the efiect of the wars and revolutions which convulsed England for the greater part of the fifteenth century. How many a name which would have come down to us with all clearness in other centuries, has emerged from the fifteenth little better than a myth ! But a still more direct cause of the oblivion which be- fell the name of Wiclif in the times preceding the Re- formation was the discredit which attached to it through the fanaticism of so many of the " Lollards." The cun- ning skill which fastened upon the Reformer the respon- sibility for the levelling and socialistic doctrines of a large section of these men was only too successful ; and its influence was so powerful that it has remained to our own day with but little abatement. It may be traced not only in the pages of Lingard, which excites no surprise, but in such a book as Dean Hook's " Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury," where we should hardly have expected to find the venerable author referring to "Wiclif's " republicanism " * or to the " extreme revolutionary principles which he had maintained and propagated." t So fatal has been this stigma to the Reformer's fame * iv. 338. t lb- 344. 12 LECTURE I. that it may be well to deal with it before we proceed further with the history of the Wiolif literature. Proceeding at first from the very natural hostility of his contemporaries, the survival of these charges — so far as it is not the result of mere thoughtless repetition — may be accounted for on two grounds : — (1) the supposed connection of Wiclif with the Insurrection of the Boors in 1381, along with the assertion that John Ball, its moving spirit and the true progenitor of the revolutionary Lollards, professed to have imbibed his views from Wiclif; and (2) the mistakes which have been made in interpreting a scholastic thesis of the Reformer's — that " Dominion is founded in Grace." The first of these causes of the discredit attached to Wiclifs reputation has been treated by many, writers. It has been showfl. that Ball's so-called confession was not drawn up till forty years after his execution, and even from that questionable document it cannot be gathered that Wiclif ever held any correspondence with the rebels ; while the silence of the contemporary Froissart, who treats the Insurrection at length, as well as of the later Walsingham, ever ready to fasten upon a supposed flaw in Wiclifs character, outweighs any such vague assertions. The latter writer does, indeed, virtually confute the scandal by connecting the movements with the Friars, who had recently become Wiclifs deadly enemies. Wiclif himself notices it as lamentahilis conflictus,* and strenuously defends his followers from the charge of disseminat- ing a spirit of anarchy and disobedience. But the * X)e Masphemia. WICLIF DISTINGUISHED FROM BALL. 13 absence of this accusation from any of the articles officially charged against Wiclif, when it is certain that the most slight and feeble charges would have been welcome, is of itself enough to settle the question. Dr. Vaughan has well said that " the Reformer always felt his dependence on the civil power, as his only means of protection against the displeasure of the ruling clergy, much too sensibly to allow of his becoming the patron of revolt against the authority of the magistrate." * As we shall not recur to this subject it may be well to caution the unwary against being deceived by the favourite device of the period following on Wiclif's life-time, when the Lollards of all sections — and there were many varieties t — were commonly included under the convenient name of Wicliffites ; a practice which has been repeated in later times. This is most unjust. It was to be expected that these poor, per- secuted men should degenerate when their leaders were removed by death or silenced by the hand' of power, that their ignorance and fanaticism should increase as the movement was driven into more and more secret channels, and that rank socialistic extra- vagances should grow up amongst them. It was the offensive and fanatical conduct of these men which excited attention and provoked repression ; but it would be an equally great mistake to suppose that there were not Lollards of a superior type to this. At any rate the Reformer and his " Poor Priests " may * Monograpli, p. 263. t Under the common name of Lollards was gathered every species of religious malcontent." (Faso. Zizan., p. Ixvii.) 14 LECTURE I. be as easily distinguished from the revolutionary men who disgraced the Pre-reformation as Luther and Melancthon from the Anabaptists of Munster.* As to the quaint expression, "Dominion is founded in Grace," Dr. Shirley has shown that the second equally quaint, and to us profane, thesis charged against Wiclif, " God must obey the Devil," was used by him as a correlative, by which he sought to repel the extreme inferences apparently capable of being drawn from the first. They were both, in fact, the paradoxical forms in which the schoolmen of the day were accustomed to present their conclusions. It may be worth while to attempt to make them inteUigible. Wiclif found himself confronted with a vast, long- descended system of ecclesiastical domination, which required, if its abuses were to be removed, to be attacked not only by exposure, but by logical proof, suited to the feudal frame-work of existing society. The ecclesiastical system had been studiously built into that frame -work. The mark of a fee- simple, " for ever," had been most carefully stamped on every por- tion of it, irrespective of all reference to moral fitness or corresponding duty. At least it had come to this. His object was to show that the system was under no such inherent condition of " for ever," and that its being * Mr. Churcliill Batington, in his Introduction to Pecock's Repressor (Master of the EoUs' Series), makes the following remark, but it con- veys only a part of the truth. There were Puritans and Puritans : — " The discontented party of the Church of the Fifteenth Century may fairly be considered as precursors of the Eeformed Church of the Elizabethan age, while the more extreme portion (to whom the name of Lollards is perhaps now more usually limited) were developed into the Puritanical party of the same period." "DOMINION FOUNDED IN GRACE." rs established was nothing unless it was doing the duty for which it was intended. As "the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath," so the clergy were established and endowed for the sake of the whole body of the Church ; the whole body of the Church did not exist for the benefit of the clergy. The spiritual oflSce was not a Dominium but a Minis- ierium. The ideal root-theory of the priesthood, from the Pope to the humblest village parson, was holiness. Every clergyman convicted of mortal sin had by rights forfeited his office ; but of course this forfeiture could not always be enforced. God himself permitted evil. Thus while " Dominion was founded in Grace," " God must obey the Devil." Whether the salt had become so generally corrupt that it had lost its savour, the laity must judge. If it had — and he believed it had — " Interest regum et aliorum rectificare eleemosynas progenitorum suorum,"* the powers of the State must interfere. He called on King and* Parlia- ment to see to it, but he never asked them to make an indiscriminate confiscation. Unfaithful clergy were to be judged by Synods ; superfluous wealth was to be applied to pious uses, such as relief of poverty, t Now what is this but the modern doctrine of the Royal Supremacy and " Clergy-discipline " ? What did he contemplate but some such reformation as actually, though with too much violence, took place a hundred and fifty years later ? What are these prin- ciples but such as we see daily at work in Ecclesias- * De Yeritate 8S. t " John Wiolif and his English Precursors ;" ty Professor LeoUer, D.D.; translated by Peter Lorimer,D.D. (Kegan, Paul, and Co.) ii. 149. 1 6 LECTURE I. tical Commissions, Cathedral Commissions, University Commissions, Abolition of Church Rates, Tithe Com- mutation, and the rest? "What is there in Wiclif's doctrine but the principle that ecclesiastics are subject to the fundamental condition of good behaviour, eccle- siastical property to the revision of the State from time to time in order that it may not be abused ? Or, to look back as well as forward, what was Wiclif's doctrine but an assertion of the old English Constitution? Was not the claim of the State to prevent clerical scandal, to punish clerical crime, to destroy clerical immunity from law, and even to regulate clerical endowments, constantly and often successfully made, all through the Plantagenet period ? It was natural that Wiclif's enemies should resent his doctrine as revolutionary ; it is scarcely just that we should do so. They also attempted to discredit it as a general attack upon property ; for it was neces- sary that the jealousy of the laity should, if possible, be aroused, as if their turn was to come next. There was just this foundation for the charge. It was true that Wiclif taught that for the laity also, " Dominion is founded in Grace." His doctrine was the precursor of our famous modern apophthegm — " Pro- perty has its duties as well as its rights." No such rights, said he, are to be considered as inherently unconditional and absolute in the sight of God. They are dependent on His Will, on His Grace. Tour pro- perty is yours in one sense, not in another. It is yours to serve your generation withal ; and it is one of the fundamental objects of your being seised of your lands THESIS APPLIED TO LAYMEN. 17 " for ever " that you may provide for the worship of God, may take your part in the affairs of the Church, and see that its abuses are corrected. You cannot in conscience leave these matters to the clergy : it is your business. It is only the student of Wiclif 's works who can fully perceive that this not only was, but must have been, the meaning of his paradoxical utterances. Those works are full of exhortations to obey superiors and respect rights. He constantly asserted the duty of obedience, even to wicked rulers.* Let us at least bear in mind Dr. Shirley's wise caution. His thesis — "Ought never in justice to its author to be published without his declaration that it was put forth as an ideal, and with the full admission that it was incom- patible in many of its results with the existing state of society." t If bad and ignorant men were found to use this great name in support of an indiscriminate confis- cation of Church property, it was the fault of an age which had allowed Papal corruptions to reach such a point that the oppressed, outraged, disgusted oppo- nents of the system might be reckoned at half the population. If the whole body ecclesiastical was dis- eased from head to foot ; if a network of Pardons, Indulgences, Simony, secularity, immorality was spread all round and over society, it was no wonder that many thought the time had come to break right through it, * The EngHsli Works of Wyclif hitherto unprinted ; edited by F. D. Matthew ; 1880 ; p. xxxvi. t Fasc. Zizan, p. 62. C 1 8 LECTURE I. to resume or reorganize the ancient dotations of tlie Church. Better the clergy should begin over again, and live by tithes only, and by alms — or, as we should say, by the Offertory — than go on for ever abusing the pious zeal of former ages. The blind were leading the blind. The teaching was known by its fruits. " That the state of society was widely and deeply corrupt, no candid person who possesses a competent knowledge of the subject will deny."* We need not appeal to "Piers Ploughman," or even, to modern Roman Catholic writers, such as the one quoted by Dean Hook.f Perhaps these first principles have been too much neglected in the usual surveys of the subject; but they ought to suggest one very obvious application in refer- ence to Wiclif himself. A Reformer of this thorough stamp must needs have been acknowledged by all to have done his own duty, whether in his University or in his different country parishes, with an honest devo- tion beyond the reach of hostile criticism. Amidst the loud chorus of disapprobation, hatred, and con- tempt, not a challenging voice was raised, not a trace of any attempt to apply the tu quoque argument has yet been found in the writings of the ag.e. It was the goodness of the man which made him formidable. We shall not then find it difficult to understand how the English Inquisition — for such was its self- selected name — which became all-powerful at the close of the fourteenth, and remained so all through the fifteenth century, was inflexibly resolved to crush out the very name of the Reformer, and almost suc- * Babington's Preface to Pecock's Sepressor, p. xxxi. t " Lives of the Arclibiahops," iii., 68. WIC LIE'S BIBLE. 19 ceeded ; and why no one thought of reviving his memory, or printing his works, even when the Press was bursting into life, and the Eenaissance had filled the land. But it may be asked — if the latent spirit of pro- test and inquiry which had been created in England by his exertions, if tradition and the private circu- lation of his vernacula, which, Leland tells us, at an interval of more than a century, were "widely read" in his time, with their dumb appeal to human grati- tude, failed to place his name in the front rank — how was it that the Bible, which he had been the first to translate into the current English, and which was the very corner-stone of the Reformation, had equally failed to hand down the personaKty of the Reformer ? It may be accounted for partly by its expensiveness, partly by the secrecy of its circulation. The Bible translated by Wiclif and his associates, or rather the two Bibles — for there were two distinct copies — cost what we should now consider an enormous sum, and therefore could not, in its entirety, be the property of more than a few. Indeed it would hardly have been circulated at all, even in portions, if such a stringent prohibition had existed before 1408 as was issued in that year by Archbishop Arundel and his Convocation. It was as follows : — "That no unauthorised person should hereafter trans- late any portion of Holy Scripture into English, or any other language, by way of book, little book, or tract ; and that no such book or tract should be read either in whole or in part, publicly or privately, that was com- posed lately in the time of John Wiclif, or since, under the penalty of the greater excommunication, tiU the 20 LECTURE I. said translation shall be approved either by the Bishop of the Diocese, or, if necessary, by a Provincial Council." It is needless to say that this was tantamount to absolute prohibition. Happily for the world several years of comparative liberty had intervened before the Lancastrian dynasty conspired against it, turning for help in its hour of weakness to the Archbishop and the hierarchy ; and abundant use had been made of the interval. In all probability also, even after the prohibition, this decree of Convocation was more easily evaded than it would have been had the Bible been printed. Secrecy was more easily preserved when one man could copy, than when printing-presses necessarily attracted observation ; and it was an obvious precaution, care- fully observed, to omit the names of the translators. This explains how copies of the Bible, many of them beautifully transcribed, found their way into the libraries of princes and great ecclesiastics, and how even Sir Thomas More and Cranmer were deceived into the belief that the unref ormed Church had not impeded the translation. More had himself seen many English copies of the Bible which he believed to be prior to Wiclif's time. It is now known that he had never seen any English Bible but those of Wiclif. It was not only the one translation of the whole of the Scriptures into English which had ever been made, but actually by a hundred years the first translation into a European language. Bede had translated St. John's Grospel into the vernacular of his day ; ' ' fragments there had been in [English and in] several languages ; but WICLIF AND TYNDALE. 21 this work, being complete from Genesis to Revelation, intelligible to the people of that day, and intended for their express perusal, may be regarded as the first positive instance of the kind in modern Europe." * It is impossible to measure the full effect of this extraordinary work of Wiclif and his friends ; but there is no excuse in the present day for ignorance in respect of it, or for underrating its importance. This splendid version has long been before the world, having been sumptuously and most carefully edited by Mr. Forshall and Sir Frederick Madden, the persons of all others most fitted for a task which cost them twenty-two laborious years. For our present sketch the remarkable thing is that when the Bible appeared openly on the scene as the main agent of the English Eeformation, it was not due to Wiclif's labours, but to the equally extraordinary exertions of William Tyndale. His translation from the Hebrew and Greek into the English of his day, which had undergone some con- siderable change since "Wiclif wrote, completely and at once (1526) occupied the ground. It did so not only from this cause and from its superiority over Wiclif's transition, which was necessarily made from the Vulgate, but from the immense difference in price and extent of production caused by printing: Tyndale's Bible could be bought for some twentieth part of the former cost of Wiclif's, i.e. for three shillings and sixpence, or about two pounds of our money. Thus, •Anderaon's "History of the Bible." This whole suhject is excellently treated in the preface to Forshall and Madden's edition of Wiclif's Bible, as well as by Dr. Lechler (vol. i. ch. vii.). 2 2 LECTURE I. however largely the Eeformer's translation had taught the "lay-party" and "Bible-men" of the fifteenth century,* and contributed to the religious knowledge which prepared the ground for the Reformation, how- ever nobly it had served as a model for the new book, it is easy to see why the name of Wiclif remained in obscurity at the very time when his labours were at last crowned with success. The English people, though they little dreamt of it, owed far more to Wiclif than to Luther. To put the case in other words : — while the classi- cal importations from Italy ought to have their full share of credit for opening the eyes of the early Reformers of the sixteenth century, while we cannot but observe how the next generation were influenced by the contemplation of the furious struggle going on in Germany, while we cannot refuse to perceive the great part played by the personal character of Henry the Eighth, we are also called upon to give its full weight to the gradual education of the English people, which had been steadily proceeding beneath the surface of society ever since Wiclif's time. It is not too much to say that it saved the English Reformation from the extravagances and errors which naturally sprang from the comparative suddenness of the change elsewhere. We are all, in short, familiar enough with the fact that it was by the agency of Wiclif's works that the principles of the Reformation made their way in Bohemia, from thence (through the foul proceed- * See the Preface of Forsliall and Madden, p. xxxiv., and Mr. Babington's Introduction to the Repressor. SECRET GROWTH OF REFORMATION. 23 ings of the Council of Constance) to all Europe, and, be- coming transplanted into tlie German mind, tliat they assisted Luther in bringing about the Reformation with which we associate his name. But the circumstances we have reviewed have contributed to obscure the equally certain fact of the irrepressible growth and steady development of these principles for generations, through Wiclif's works, in England itself; and the history of the English Eeformation is unintelligible without it. To those who have followed the argument thus far, it will not appear strange that it took nearly two centuries to give back to the English people any definite notion of Wiclif. A little further exercise of imagination as to the events of those two hundred years will enable us to understand why the process of recovering the real personality of the Eeformer, during the subsequent three hundred, has been slow, fluctuating, tortuous. Let us attempt the briefest sketch of that process. It was not tUl the " spacious reign of great Eliza- beth" gave promise of security for English freedom from the Papal yoke that Foxe, the martyrologist, whose famous work has been as much undervalued in modern times as it was originally overvalued, brought the memory of Wiclif for the first time since his death fairly before the world. Under the searching light of modern criticism, while the prejudices and inaccu- racies of the learned Foxe have been fully exposed, the 24 LECTURE I. vast amount of true research and useful history con- tained in the " Acts and Monuments " is most ungrate- fully forgotten. Yet the great Archbishops of Eliza- beth's reign ordered it to be set up in " every one of the parish churches as well as in the Common Halls of archbishops, bishops, deans, archdeacons, and heads of houses ; " and his professed admirers, Camden, Strype, and Burnet, to whom history owes so much, cannot even now be treated with contempt. Written in 1563, his book went through nine editions in little more than a century, and set the example for multitudes of similar works on the continent. Of all his services none were greater than the revival of a knowledge of Wiclif Now for the first time the main outlines of the Re- former's career, advancing out of the mythical stage, became a part of English history. That history was indeed as yet but weak and un- critical, and Foxe's contribution fell far short of per- fection. He brought out into full prominence the originality and extent of the reforms for which Wiclif agitated both in relation to doctrine and morals, but he had only a slight knowledge of his works, and he con- fused them with those of his followers ; his sympathy with some of the extreme opinions of the Lollards led him into errors, and the sensational character of the style which he adopted led him to regard a confessor who was not burnt at the stake with somewhat less admiration than, on Foxe's own principles, was Wiclif s due. Above all he unaccountably omitted all mention of the Reformer's chief claim to notice, the translation of the Bible. On the other hand no writer has more FOXE RESTORES WICLIF'S MEMORY. 25 luminously traced his relation to tlie Bohemian move- ment, the Council of Constance, and the German Reformation. It was this half-fashioned image of Wiclif, stamped upon the public mind by Foxe, which afforded such a handle to the Jesuits and other Roman Catholic writers of the Post-reformation age. Familiar with the weapons of the Pre-ref ormation Church in its seemingly successful attempt to crush its mortal foe, they braced themselves after much the same fashion to the struggle against his memory, but with a very different result. We do, in fact, owe the more just appreciation of Wiclif 's position which obtains in our own day to those' attacks, for they were the means of leading first Dr. James, and then Mr. Lewis, to undertake a new and more thorough examination of Wiclif 's writings. Sub- sequent English writers have followed in their track ; Germany has joined in the pursuit ; and we may now consider ourselves almost in sight of the goal which every lover of truth must earnestly desire to reach. Father Parsons and YariUas may be tp,ken as speci- mens of these Roman Catholic writers. With a con- siderable interval of time between them they adopted somewhat different methods of attack. The celebrated Parsons attempted to prove that Wiclif having remained to the last within the Communion of the Church of his day, and retained the substantial out- lines of its doctrines and practices, gave, however loudly he may have denounced its supposed corruptions, no countenance to the Reformation which had broken away from that Church, nor to the doctrines which had 26 LECTURE I. been set up in opposition. Dr. James, Fellow of New College, the first librarian entrusted witb tbe treasures by which Sir Thomas Bodley had just enriched his University, replied to the Jesuit in 1608. This acute, learned, and indefatigable writer preferred to rest his case, not on the argument of the earlier E-eformers that the Papal Church had been really guilty of the schism, since it had refused to be reformed and had ejected the Reformers, or on the argument that, though Wiclif died within its Communion, be could scarcely have conti- nued alive any longer within it under the ever-accu- mulating persecutions of himself and his followers, but on the very effective argument which his title-page exhibits. His now very rare book, an excellent speci- men of the style of controversy in James's reign, is. thus recommended to its readers : it is — " An Apologia for John Wickliife, shewing his con- formitie with the now Church of England, with answere to such slanderous objections as have been lately urged against him by Father Parsons, the Apologists, and others, collected chiefly out of diverse books of his in written hand, by God's special Provi- dence remaining in the Publike Library at Oxford of the honourable foundation of Sir Thomas Bodley, Knight." Prefixed to the book are two of these manuscripts, which James prints by way of specimens ; and the general plan is to marshal passages from the rest of ' those in the Bodleian side by side with the allegations of his opponents. A short abstract of the work may be acceptable, and it is certainly very much to the point of this Lecture. DR. JAMES'S "APOLOGIE." 27 The author commences by discussing what he considers the vital principles on which Wiclif had amply proYed the conformity of his doctrine with that of the Church of England, and its distinctiveness from that of Rome. These are — (1) the sufficiency of Holy Scripture ; (2) that traditions of the Church are to he brought to the test of Scripture ; (3) as to the Papal pretensions ; (4) as to the alleged infallibility of the Roman Church ; (5) and (6) as to justification by faith ; and (7) as to the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper. He next points out "Wiclif's true position on the articles of Roman doctrine which he was alleged to have retained. These include the number of the Sacraments, images, degrees in sin, auricular confession, satisfaction for sin, pardons and indulgences, vows, celibacy of the clergy, dispen- sations, equivocation, the denial of the Royal Supre- macy, the Roman excommunication, Church govern- ment, purgatory, and prayers to the saints. On the last two of these points he admits that he has not materials for wholly clearing his author, but is con- vinced that if he only had the whole of his works together, which in the course of ages had been so indus- triously "mangled," he should find that Wiclif had retracted these opinions in his later days ; and he remarks on the assertion of Friar Walden and Wal- singham that he had spoken irreverently on these points, and sufiered accordingly. Dr. James next meets " Objections," both on the part of the Jesuit and of the "Apologists," and it might be useful to some modern writers if they were to study the mode in which this sturdy librarian deals 28 LECTURE I. ■with the admissions against Wiclif 's fame whicli were made by the latter, by men, for example, like Foxe and Stowe, who thought it necessary to repeat some, at least, of the charges made by Papal writers. Thus he contemptuously disproves and dismisses the asser- tions that his author held it generally unlawful to hold temporal goods, or that ecclesiastics should live by begging, or that all oaths were unlawful ; that he was a Fatalist, or a Pelagian ; that he had ever retracted his opinions, or that he was influenced by having been refused a bishopric. The " Objections " made by the Jesuit do not admit of an equally simple treatment ; but the author is fairly successful in showing that when Wiclif asserted that "mortal sin incapacitated a bishop or priest" he did not exclude the worthy receiver of the Sacra- ment at his hands from grace, and that when he used the expression that " there is no excommunication unless a person knows himself to be excommunicated of God," he was attacking the whole system of excom- munication for private wrongs and mere formal delin- quencies. A- certainty of grievous moral wrong was a necessary ingredient in a Church censure. How little such necessity was generally admitted was sufE- ciently witnessed in that corrupt age. One remark made by Dr. James should be specially noticed. It is that though Wiclif " notes abuses in general, he never names any one of his adversaries, monk or friar." In such an age, and under such terrible provocation, this is indeed praise. On the whole, Dr. James's work was an important WICLIF AND THE CAROLINE DIVINES. 29 contribution. THe honest librarian was penetrated with an intense disgust at the process of " garbling," "mangling," "falsifying" that had gone on for so many years. He looked upon it in the light of a special Providence, as his title-page shows, that manu- scripts had been deposited in the Bodleian which could yet be printed entire ; he, at least, as the first person who had been privileged to use them, would do his best in the cause ; and he calls on all who would listen to him to make use of the press while they could, if they wished to save what had been gained during the struggles of a century with an unscrupulous foe, whose resources never seemed to be exhausted. That this enthusiastic churchman was not carried away by groundless fears is proved by the subsequent treatment of Wiclif's memory during the Caroline period. The Elizabethan estimate of the Reformer, which such men as Bishop Andrewes were found to endorse, began to decline under the tendency to extremes on either side which characterized the reign of Charles the First. The Eeformer was, on the one hand, too dangerous a theologian for the Caroline divines ; he was, on the other, far from meeting suffi- ciently the demands of those who preferred the posi- tion assumed by the most violent Lollards. The few men of the time who were moderate as well as learned could hardly expect the world to listen to antiquarian conclusions. Events were marching too furiously. And yet perhaps few things might have been more useful even then, amidst the din of controversy ham- mered to white heat, than a masterly exhibition of 30 LECTURE I. the via media as exhibited in the true history of Wiclif and his opinions. That Fuller saw the need is plain from the following passage. Writing in 1665, he says: — " What pity is it that we want Wiclif 's works, to hear him speak on his own behalf! Were they all extant therein we might read the occasion, intention, and connection of what he spake, together with the limitations, restrictions, distinctions, qualifications, of what he maintained. There we might see what was the overplus of his passion, and what the j ust measure of his judgment. Many phrases heretical in sound would appear orthodox in sense ; yea, some of his poisonous passages, dressed with due caution, would prove not only wholesome, but cordial truths ; many of his expressions wanting not granum ponderis but salis, no weight of truth, but grains of discretion. But now, alas ! of the two hundred books which he wrote, being burnt, not a tittle is left, and we are fain to borrow the bare titles of them from his adversaries, from whom also these his opinions are extracted, who winnow his works as Satan did Peter, not to find the corn, but the chaff there." These plaintive sentences betray the sense of hope- lessness which oppressed the witty historian when he contemplated the state of public opinion produced upon this subject by the controversies of the day. Few things could indicate the spirit of the Laudian church- men better than the remark made in 1672 by Dr. Fell, the leading man of the Restoration period at Oxford, to Anthony Wood — a remark which coloured Wood's whole treatment of the Reformer. It was this: — " John Wycleve was a grand dissembler, a man of FULLER, FELL, WOOD, COLLIER. 31 little conscience ; and what lie did as to religion was more out of vainglory, and to obtain unto him a name, than out of honesty."* Wood even repeats this say- ing in his Annals, in order to illustrate the accusa- tion, which he copies from his predecessors, that the Reformer had adopted his principles out of revenge and disappointment at being refused preferment. All his notices are conceived in the same spirit, which was not likely to be corrected by mere exclusive references to Wiclif 8 contemporary opponents and persecutors. Yet even he reports of Wiclif that h^ was " clarissimus theologus, excellentis et plane divini ingenii, immensa et pene innumera doctrince monumenta post se reliquit." With Fell and Wood may be classed such men as Heylin, in bis Animadversions on Fuller, and the famous Nonjuror, Jeremy Collier, whose Ecclesiastical History, coming out in Queen Anne's reign, has been a standard book ever since. Again, at that later date, there was no likelihood of Wiclif s fame being righted by Collier, for he pursues exactly the same course as Wood, makes no reference whatever to the author's own works, quotes the same Roman Catholic detractors who were Wiclif's contemporary opponents, and of course gives precisely the same one-sided account of his actions and opinions. It is perhaps Collier's literary influence which has raised up the densest barrier against a proper comprehension of Wiclif's ' position amongst modern educated Englishmen. While the memory of this great man was merci- * Wood's Life, Ixxxi. 32 LECTURE I. lessly hunted about in the seventeenth century, it happily struck a prolific French writer, in the latter part of that age, to publish an anonymous book called, " Histoire de Wiclefianisme, ou de la doctrine de Wiclif, Jean Hiis, et Jerome de Prague." This was the work of Varillas, a man who perhaps of all professed his- torians has come down to us with the worst fame for Yeracity, and it bears undeniable evidence of its pater- nity in the almost incredible malice and ignorance it displays. StUl more happily the book found an English translator, a so-called "Presbyter of the Church of England," for it is in reply to this " pre- tended Presbyter " that the Eev. John Lewis, A.M., " minister of Margate," wrote, in 1720, his celebrated "History of the Life and Sufferings of the Reverend and learned John "Wicliffe, D.D." As Foxe first established Wiclif's claims to respect, so here we have for the first time a careful account of the Reformer's life and opinions, together with the documents referred to ; as also some account of the manuscript works which Lewis had himself seen, and even,' in many cases, copious extracts from those works. This has always been reckoned the standard book on the subject ; it was reprinted by the Univer- sity of Oxford in 1820 ; and Dr. Shirley pronounced it the best, even down to the date when he himself wrote. It certainly commends itself to the scholar by its unpretending, business-like style, and its painstaking regard for accuracy. But it may be questioned whether the late Dr. Yaughan has received his due when Lewis's merits, except on the score of priority. VAUGHAN AND OTHER WRITERS. 33 are preferred to his. Vaughan not only examined a far larger number of the Reformer's manuscripts, and gave a mucli more copious body of extracts than were ever given before, but he collected several treatises which had already been separately printed, translated the most important parts of the famous " Triahgus," and produced no less than three successive " Lives " in the years 1828, 1845, and 1853. These " Lives " were put forth in forms well suited for popular read- ing, and it is to these labours that the people of England are chiefly indebted for the knowledge of Wiclif they now possess. Dr. Yaughan's services are fully and gratefully recognised in Germany. In noticing these two principal writers the names of Gilpin, Baber, and Le Bas should not be forgotten ; but they occupy a very inferior place. The last of these authors has produced the best composition, but he did not possess sufficient critical power to detect certain oft- repeated fallacies found in earlier books ; and, amongst other things, gave further currency to the indiscriminate charge of " revolutionary principles." Finally, to complete the proof of the need for recalling public attention to Wiclif, let us take by way of example three or four cases of authors no longer living, whose treatment of the subject may serve as specimens of the all but universal failure of modern writers, great and small, to place the Reformer and his work fairly before the public. In most of them the failure may be traced, as has been said, to reliance upon works which are now known not to be "Wiclif's, or some traditional view of his character D 3+ LECTURE I. which eyen the present state of our knowledge, if shared by the writers, would have caused them to modify. Lingard's History of England is a book admir- able in many respects, and placed by authority in the forefront of those to be studied in the Oxford School of Modern History. The author, as all admit, is the most fair-minded of Roman Catholics, yet he considers Wiclif s controversy with the friars ridiculous ; the Reformer is scoffed at for accepting preferments contrary to his supposed principle of poverty ; his " Poor Priests " are a body of fanatics, and paved the way for the insurrection of the Boors ; his appearance before Courtenay at St. Paul's is so represented as to do him discredit, which he certainly did not deserve ; the order of the papers composing his defence at the famous trial of 1381 is so disposed as to give the appearance of retractation — a mistake exposed by Dr. Vaughan ; the subtle language of the schools which Wiclif naturally and properly employed by way of technical defence, is " quibble and evasion ; " his appeal to Parliament from bitter enemies bent on his destruction, is an appeal to the " passions and prejudices of the nation ; " the praise of " modera- tion " is given to his ecclesiastical persecutors who, for very good reasons, did not pursue him quite to the death ; his theory that the corruptions of the Church had not attained their then existing development till mediaeval times is a fantastic illusion ; his doctrine on the Sacraments is misrepresented from beginning to end, and a whole series of passages of an opposite, but possibly reconcilable tendency to those quoted, are LINGARHS TREATMENT OF WICLIF. 35 omitted, though equally genuine and accessible with the rest ; opinions apparently irreconcilable are simply extracted from different works which had been published at different times, and placed side by side without any allowance for that circumstance, while other opinions are cited from works now classed among the " doubtful " ones attributed to "Wiclif. The success which attended his translation and dispersion of the Bible is ascribed to the fact that men were " flattered by the appeal to their private judgment ; " and he concludes by remarking that " the seeds were thus sown of that religious revolution which in little more than a century astonished and convulsed the nations of Europe." Of course, the treatment of the Reforma- tion itself is of a piece with that of him who " sowed the seed." It is a misfortune that a book with such serious defects should still retain its place in the Oxford Schools. It would be well if something could be found to take its place. The shortcomings of modern Church of England authors are of course not so numerous, and they are different in kind ; but they equally illustrate the need of sound knowledge based upon a complete treatment of the whole "Wiclif literature. In the case of Dean Hook, to whom ecclesiastical history is greatly indebted, besides the errors already mentioned, he is responsible for the wholly gratuitous and unfounded charge against "Wiclif that he laboured under the defect of " physical timidity," and for repeating the erroneous accusation that he explained away his more offensive statements. The Reformer is further blamed for affording an 36 LECTURE I. " example," whicli the authorities of the Church copied from him, of appeal to the civil power. If ever there was an illustration of the fable of the wolf and the lamb, the good Dean has here supplied it. In the persecuted Wiclif we have a man appealing against an almost all-powerful hierarchy to the laws of the land. On the other side we have that corrupt hierarchy taking advantage of its unique political opportunity to obtain new inquisitorial powers, by means of which the State was made the dumb executioner under the control of ecclesiastical judges. Ileflection on the manner in which these judges used their advantage during the succeeding period might, one would think, have suggested the fallacy of such reasoning. Let us not, however, forget that it is Hook who has said that " John Wiclif may be justly accounted one of the greatest men that our country has produced. He is one of the very few who have left the impress of their minds, not only on their own age, but on all time." * Even the able work of Chancellor Massingberd, " The English Eeformation," quotes, as Wiclifs, books which are not his, and betrays ignorance of the balance afforded by some of his writings to state- ments in others which he considers open to the charge of a " zeal beyond the bounds of truth and soberness."t He gives, however, a far superior sketch on every point to that of Dean Hook, though, unlike the latter, he seems to have made no use whatever of Dr. Shirley's * Lives of the Arclibishops ; iii., 76. t Fourth Edition, 1866; p. 132. HOOK, MASSINGBERD, MILMAN. 37 researches. It is a happy phrase of the late Chancellor of Lincoln that " Wiclif was the first who dared to outface the wasting system of corruption and tyranny which had overspread all Europe, and his success showed how much may be done against the world by one single-hearted man valiant for the truth."* As Dean Milman wrote previously to Dr. Shirley, his sketch, the most brilliant which has yet appeared, and the most appreciative of "Wiclif's multifarious claims to our respect, is, like that of Massingberd, open to criticism from want of information. His genius, howevei", led him to discover a way through many of the mazes out of which others have not even yet seen theirs. He justly pronounces that Wiclif cannot be " fairly charged with insincerity, disingenu- ousness, or even politic art ;" but, on the other hand, he errs in disparaging him for want of a constructive power equal to that he showed in the process of destruction. In this Milman has copied Le Bas, and been followed by others. The man who, as Milman says, " swept away one by one almost all the peculiar tenets of mediaeval Latin Christianity, pardons, in- dulgences, excommunications, absolutions, pilgrimages, who had condemned images, at least of the Persons of the Trinity, rejected Transubstantiation, and, by the translation of the Latin Scripture and the assertion of the sole authority of Scripture, had laid the foundation," — surely this man had done all that the English Church required for her purgation. "When at last the time had come she made no breach with the past, she re- * Ibid, p. 154. 38 LECTURE I. quired no new systems of doctrine. The rust of ages purged away, and the book of the law once more brought forth from its hiding-place, everything else followed as a matter of course. If certain systematic forms were gradually found necessary, it was rather because the temper of the times had changed than from any inherent necessity. But, after all, it was from dearth of material that Milman erred. As Dr. James suggested, and as another Lecture will more fully exhibit, Wiclif may easily be proved to have implicitly put forth a whole system of doctrine, almost identical with that of our Prayer-book and Articles. In order to avoid too great formality this Lecture has incidentally noticed, rather than scientifically treated, the history and present state of the Wiclif literature. It may properly conclude with extracts from competent authorities as to what remains to be done. Scarcely any of the Reformer's Latin works, stored in the Imperial Library of Vienna, whither the course of events carried them after they were taken out of England for safety, have even yet seen the light, and we are still dependent on reports derived from those who have consulted them. And yet Dr. Shirley told us long ago — " Until some con- siderable portion of Wiclifs Latin works, which are by far the most important, is published, it will be vain to attempt [even] an accurate list of his English tracts."* This has been once again stated by Mr. Matthew. It had been supposed, on Dr. Vaughan's authority, that the English works were the more * Fasc. Zizan. p. xlii. WICLIF'S LATIN WORKS. 39 numerous of the two. Mr. T. Arnold and Dr. LecMer have exposed this error. The latter speaks thus : — " In fact the English pieces are, for the most part, nothing more than mere tracts of a couple of pages, and the largest of them fills at most three or four sheets, while the series of Latin works includes from ten to twelve equal to the " Trialogus" in bulk, every one of which would fill a respectable octavo volume. But the importance of the contents, too, in the case of many of the Latin works, is far superior to that of the English. Scientifically considered it is only the Latin works which are of value. Wiclif's philo- sophical and theological position can only be learned from them with certainty and thoroughness ; while his English writings are chiefly valuable, in part for the history of the English language and literature, and in part for our knowledge of the influence of Wiolif upon the English people."* Dr. Buddensieg quotes the distinguished historian Pauli in the same sense, and remarks that " Wiclif the theologian, Wiclif the controversialist, will only be thoroughly understood when a selection of the most important Latin works shall be added to what is already published." He also remarks,t with much force, on the light which these Latin works throw on contemporary history, references to which are scat- tered throughout. On this point we may form some conception of their value from the similar lights which have already been pointed out by Mr. Matthew, even from the stray English works which he has, just col- * Lorimer'a Leohler, ii. 325. t Preface to "De Christo et adversario suo Antichristo (1880), 40 LECTURE I. lected and published. So also the late learned Dr. Todd, of Dublin, in 1840. " They who would engage in the publication of the works of WyclyiFe must be above the narrow influences of Utilitarianism. They must keep in view a higher field of learning than comes within the sphere of mercantile speculators. They must feel that the value of these documents as compositions is but a secondary object of their publication ; the great end must be the discovery of truth and the preservation of the remains of an illustrious character in our history." * In the face of concurrent testimony to the need of printing these works it is distressing to hear that the authorities of the Oxford University Press have found themselves obliged to decline Dr. Buddensieg's offer to undertake the task of editing them. He has well proved his competency for the work by the book to which reference has just been made, and one must suppose that nothing but imperative necessity could have prompted the refusal of the University to perform what would seem to be its natural function. Let us hope that some other Society or munificent individual may step into its place. No litetary enterprise of a nobler character is open to any man in the present day. Having now accounted in some degree for the con- fused and irregular lights under which Wiclif has hitherto appeared before the public, let us, in the next Lecture, attempt to view him under the illumination of the latest research which it has been found practic- able, in England or on the Continent, to apply. * Preface to the "Last Age of the Church" (now known not to he Wiclifs). LECTUEE II. WICLIF'S PEEPAEATION,— AT OXFORD, AND IN EELATION TO PARLIAMENT. No research has yet enabled us to settle the question of the date of Wiclif' s hirth. That of his death we know — 1384. Several reasons may be given for believing that he was born at least as early as 1320, and that he was sent to Oxford about 1335. About thirty years later, i.e. in 1366, he appears on the public stage; and from that time we are able to trace his course with some- thing like continuity. If we are right in placing John Wiclif hot only as the greatest figure in Oxford history, but, along with Chaucer, Shakspeare, and Milton, as one of the four men who have produced the greatest effect on the English language and literature, and still further, as wholly unapproached in the entire history of England for his effect on our English theo- logy and our religious life — how eagerly must we desire to pierce the cloud which conceals him from us for all those thirty years during which he was attain- ing his marvellous stature ! And yet we cannot even say with certainty, except for one year during that time, to what college he be- longed, or whether he belonged to any college at all. 42 LECTURE II. Reserving that question for the moment, let us con- template what England and Oxford were during these thirty years, and form our own opinion whether it was not to be expected that some extraordinary represen- tative of the times should make his appearance. A great age, as we all know, makes a great man. The standard is high ; the influence of that elevated standard is found in unexpected quarters ; a'progressive attainment of superiority may be traced in one person after another, till at last we have the culmination, the one man taller by the head than all his fellows, the representative man of the age. So was it with Aris- totle in the golden age of HeUenic philosophy ; so with Cicero in that of Roman eloquence; so with Shakspeare in that of the Elizabethan drama ; so with Burke in that of the British Parliament. In the age of Edward the Third Plantagenet grandeur, English military glory, European chivalry were at their zenith. Condemn the defects of the heroic sovereign as we may — defects now so much more familiar to us than when Bishop Lowth, who also knew them pretty well, yet felt himself able to style him an " excellent prince " * — we cannot forget that he and the Black Prince were more than the restorers of the position won for England by Edward the First, that he was the grandson of a French monarch, the brother-in-law of the Emperor, the Vicar of the Empire, that he was nearly being himself elected Emperor, and that three captive or suppliant kings attended upon him in * " Life of Wykeham," p. 148. 2nd Ed. WICLIF A REPRESENTATIVE MAN. 43 London, the visible emblems of his glorious conquests. We cannot forget that the English people became truly national in his reign, cast off the trammels of the French language in their official documents, repudiated the Pope as an exactor of tribute, and scornfully rejected every vestige of Continental interference with English Church affairs. It was in 1350 that the English Parliament, undeterred by the example of France and the Empire, which had in vain attempted, to curb the system of Papal Provisions, enacted that the " Bishop of Rome " should no longer " accroach to him the seignories " of the Church, and give them to " aliens who never dwell in England, and to Cardi- nals who might not dwell there." In 1353 followed the noble Statute of Praemunire, the foundation of the Anglican liberties, which condemned all who should plead in the Bishop of Rome's Court to forfeiture, outlawry, and imprisonment. We are not concerned here with the conspiracy between popes and kings, which so often defeated these statutes, with the fre- quent re-enactments devised to protect them, or with the reaction which subsequently brought the need of reformation to such a point that nothing short of vio- lence, with its usual accompaniments of crime and error, could effect its accomplishment. It is enough to mark the dates of these great statutes, and to identify the phenomenon with the exact period when Wiclif 's mind was being formed for the work which he was to do. But if Wiclif, Kke Shakspeare in Elizabethan times, was the representative of the English mind in its unfettered national spirit, and its exulting freedom 44 LECTURE II. from the dead weight of oppressive centuries, far more was he the heir of all the ages in his position at Oxford as the successor of Grosseteste and Roger Bacon, of Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and Bradwardine. To Oxford had passed the leading place which Paris had once occupied. The foremost minds of Europe had for a century been at work there amongst vast crowds of students, whose numbers, though the received account is generally treated as fabulous, were, no doubt, enormous. It was, whatever else may be said of it in other respects, the golden age of intellectual activity at Oxford. Every fragment of what had survived the wreck of the ancient civilisa- tion had been brought to this spot, and been pieced together by able hands. The. most profound learning, the most daring speculation, the most astonishing memory, had been employed in the process ; and the prevalent system of logical disputations, by means of which the " Scholastic Philosophy " assumed its actual form, brought to the front, each in his turn, the most supremely gifted and most laborious man of his day. Such were those that have been named. The last of them was Wiclif, surnamed by his contemporaries " the Evangelical Doctor." The title was prophetic. Long before he became the Reformer of England and of Europe, he attained his extraordinary eminence in the Schools by, or at least in connection with, his intimate knowledge of what was then almost a sealed book, the Bible. To what sources he owed the impulse given to his Biblo studies is a question involved in too much obscurity to justify treatment in these Lectures. Peter WICLIF'S LITERARY POSITION. 45 Waldo's followers were Bible-men, not heretics ; and the University system was a ready means of inter- communication. Possibly it may have come through that channel. Perhaps the reason why Wiclif must be reckoned as the last of the mediaeval giants of literature is partly to be found in the very circumstances to which his career gave rise, that is to say, in the theological struggles which divided the members of the TJniversity, and broke up the common literary ground on which they had previously met. But it must be observed that the ancient literary system had, by the end of the two or three centuries during which Oxford and Cambridge had been operating along with their Continental sisters, completed its work. That system embodied the earlier Renaissance of Europe ; it was the educator of the rude nations which had sprung up on the ruins of Rome, the matrix in which were moulded the fruitful processes ushered in by the Greek and Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century. "Wiclif was the meeting-point of the two waves of literary and religious progress, the terminus ad quern and the terminus a quo of each respec- tively. The old bottles — (we must nowadays call them "wine-skins") — were empty ; they were too old to bear the new wine ; new bottles must be formed for that new wine. Wiclif was the first to perceive the fact ; the last who, being himself formed under the old system at its highest development, could construct the new. And this discovery was absolutely linked to the ecclesiastical phenomena of the day. It was Wiclif who observed with the eye of genius that the old 46 LECTURE II. society was breaking up, and that the vast ecclesiastical army which had won the victories of Christianity over barbarism and heathenism was no longer fit to monopo- lize the education, the science, the political govern- ment, the professional occupations of the English people. Already, while he was yet pursuing his Oxford career, the separation of the educated classes into different professions was rapidly progressing. The laity were beginning to make themselves felt in the schools of learning. The clergy were no longer as necessary as in earlier times, for the government of the State : the laity were beginning to be capable of taking their place. And it was, theoretically, the proper place of the laity. The terrible abuses which shook the whole fabric of society to its foundations were so closely con- nected with the great governing position of the clergy, that an observant eye could see that the time had come when the State might fairly and reasonably say, " You have done your work. Go back to your dioceses. The superfluity of the splendid revenues which might have been necessary in early feudal times to support your place and defend your rights, would be better employed in other pious and charitable ways. Give place to the new order of things." Thus from a national, a literary, an ecclesiastical, a social point of view, there was a call for a representa- tive man. However little England understood that such a man was being bred in its midst, however little it has understood it ever since, however little it is understood even now, it will be easy to prove that Wiclif was that man. OXFORD INFLUENCES. 47 Let us add that in Oxford itself, his home, and school, and centre of operations, there were many remarkable indications of a change, which could hardly escape a less keen ohserver than the future Reformer. The awful plague of 1349, the incessant warfare between bodies of students, citizens, and others, cul- minating in the fatal " Great Conflict of St. Scho- lastica's Day," in 1353, the ill-odour into which the friars were falling, had all combined to reduce the numbers and the importance of the University very far below the level to which it had attained when Wiclif came as a youthful student to Oxford. The first of these events, the plague, followed as it was by recurrent attacks of a similar kind, is well known to have had a most powerful social influence all over England. Dean Hook goes so far as to attribute the success of Wiclif in finding laymen to propagate his opinions, to the sobering effects of the Great Plague of 1349, which, destroying large numbers of the clergy who faithfully did their duty by the sick, called the " pious laity " to the front in order to supplement their ranks, " a new body of men, a body prepared to receive in due time the teaching of "Wiclif and his followers." * And Mr. Rogers considers that the effect of the loss of half the population by the plague was to bring about an " economical revolution," to produce an entire contrast to the great material prosperity of the earlier part of Edward's reign, and in elevating the lower classes, through the increased value of their labour, to cause, at the interval of a generation, the Insurrection ♦"Lives of the Ardilrisliops,'' it, 129. Lowth's "Life of "Wykeham," p. 93, Note, 48 LECTURE IT. of the Boors.* Whatever we may think of the impor- tance of these statements as bearing upon Wiclif s later acts, we can easily imagine how his active and ob- servant intellect would have recognised such social and religious changes, and how he must have meditated over the practical operations of those later years long before he gave effect to them. Nor can we imagine that master-mind watching the fraternal conflicts of his own University and City — perhaps suffering under those terrible inflictions — without many a bitter sigh, which found vent in his resolution to reform the society which bore such fruit. Still less could he witness the debasement of the monks and friars, whose great institutions at Oxford still overshadowed the as yet humble colleges of the secular clergy, without a conviction that the time had past when they had any right to arrogate to themselves the function of educators, or bring to bear upon the University the influence of French Popes and foreign Cardinals. It is true that the latest research has ghown that Wiclif's quarrel with the Mendicant Orders did not commence till long after the period of which we are now speaking ; but who can doubt that his mind was forming upon the subject? He did not indeed as yet declare war, for in their principle of poverty he acknowledged their agreement with him- self as against the " monks possessioners ; " but how little they now carried out their principles must have been tolerably obvious to the virtuous student, the earnest lecturer, the learned inquirer, the fearless * " History of Prices ; " Introduction. WICLIF'S COLLEGE. 49 thinker. Whether Chaucer had Wiclif and his special friends in his eye, as some think, or not, we may be sure that the ideal of these Reformers was the " poore persoun of a toune," and the humble "student of Oxenfoorde." The few touches thus given to the Oxford of Wiclif 's training period wiU, slight as they must be in this place, suggest an image both of the man and of the material — local, national, and ecclesiastical — on which he was to operate. They naturally lead us to inquire as to Wiclif's connection with the collegiate system at Oxford, which was then by slow and painful steps emerging into a position from whence it was at last able to deal with the disorders that had culminated in the fourteenth century. It will of course be impossible here to enter fully into arguments, which will be found elsewhere, as to the claims of Queen's, Merton, or Balliol Colleges to the honour of this great name. Forty years ago the history of the collegiate career of Wiclif had been universally received as laid down by Lewis in 1720. He had begun at Queen's, gone on to Merton as Scholar, or as we should now say. Fellow, removed to Balliol as Master of the College in 1361, been made Warden of Canterbury Hall in 1365, and been expelled from thence in 1367, at which date he was lost sight of from Oxford in connection with any College, and became national property. But in the year 1841 the discovery was made by Mr. Courthope that there had been a John Whytcliff, who was Vicar of Mayfield, in Sussex, from 1361 to 1380 ; and as it was quite certain 50 LECTURE II. that the Reformer was never Vicar of Mayfield, or the Vicar of Mayfield Master of Balliol, it was natural to inquire whether this Vicar might not himself have heen the Fellow of Merton or Warden of Canterbury Hall, or both, and thus have caused a confusion between the two men. Dr. Shirley undertook this inquiry, and came to the conclusion that it was so. The Reformer had neither been at Merton, nor had been Warden of Canterbury Hall ; still less had he been at Queen's until towards the latter part of his career, when he lived there in hired rooms. So cogent did his reason- ing appear that Dean Hook accepted this demonstra- tion as a settlement of the question, and others have followed in the wake of two such authorities. Doubts, however, were still entertained by Pratt and Stoughton, the editors of " Foxe's Martyrs ; " and lately the whole question has been once more investigated by a very competent antiquarian, the late Prebendary Wilkinson. His article in the Church (Quarterly (Oct. 1877) is considered by Doctors Lechler and Lorimer to have entirely cut away the ground from Dr. Shirley's feet ; and though the two authors diflfer with each other on the question of the connection with Merton, they hold the identity of the Reformer with the Warden of Canterbury Hall to have been now settled for ever. This may possibly be too strong ; but it must be admitted that some further discoveries since Dr. Shirley's time have much weakened his argument. On the other hand the researches which have been lately made at AH Souls* have strengthened his case THE VICAR OF MAY FIELD. 51 on one point, — to which, however, all parties seem to have attached too much importance. Previously to Dr. Shirley's time it had been pointed out that the Vicar^of Mayfield coidd not possibly have been the Warden of Canterbury Hall, as the name of the Vicar was invariably spelt with a "t," and that of the "Warden with " c," as the Reformer's also was. Dr. Shirley met that argument by demonstrating the extreme uncertainty of mediaeval orthography ; and, indeed, there are no less than twenty-eight varieties of the spelling of the Reformer's name. Nevertheless, Wilkinson supported the old objection in so conclusive a manner that both Lechler and Lorimer have endorsed him on that point as fully as on others. And yet they are wrong. In- the All Souls' archives are to be found several deeds of this period, connected with the early history of a property in possession of the College, named Le Milbury, in the manor of Padbury, Bucks ; and one of the parties concerned in the transference of the property is " John Wycclyve, Vicar of Maghe- field." This name is only once spelt with a "t," (Wyttlyve) but in four other places with " c." It may be noted with regard to the controversy on Wiclif's collegiate life, that perhaps in the whole range of such differences there has never been a case where both sides have been argued out with more ingenuity and apparent cogency, as well as with more fairness and good temper. We expect to find antiquarians positive ; they are not always courteous. To the students of this subject it is unnecessary to point out why so much importance has been attached 52 LECTURE II. to Wiclif's identification with the wardenship of Canterbury Hall. If he were not the Warden the charge so perseveringly made against him, that he became a Reformer out of revenge for having been expelled from the Hall in favour of the monks, is robbed of its significance. Not that this cause was assigned by his contemporaries, any more than was his supposed disappointment at not being preferred to what M. Varillas called the " Bishopric of Yincfort," a name which, for a foreigner, approached nearly enough to that of " Worcester." And it has certainly become a matter of less consequence, if it ever was of any, since it has been ascertained that Wiclif's bitter controversy with the friars did not commence till many years later than, up to quite a recent date, had been almost universally believed. In point of fact it did not commence long before the controversy on Transubstan- tiation in 1381. The books of that later period, the last he wrote having been the first published, and till lately the only ones known, have conveyed an entirely false impression on the subject. Nothing can be better than Wilkinson's words on this question : " If a man's actions are wise and moderate, and his teaching reason- able, serious, and straightforward, the charge of per- sonal motives and personal bitterness falls harmless to the ground." Nevertheless the controversy has occu- pied too prominent a place to be omitted in this Lecture. In spite, then, of all our modern research we can only gather for certain, in addition to the positive fact formerly known as to the mastership of Balliol, the THE CLAIMS OF MERTON. 53 negative fact that Wiclif was not bred at Queen's College. The claims of Merton are still unsettled ; though only thirty-eight years after the Reformer's death, the College believed him to have been one of their body.* The inferential arguments on this point do, in fact, pretty nearly balance one another ; so that it is quite useless to build any theories, as some have done, upon the supposed residence of the Reformer at any college, or at none. By 1360 his fame had, no doubt, become so great that even if he had belonged to a rival and opposed institution, such as Merton, the College of the Southerners, was to Northern Balliol, it was still • quite possible that he might have been elected to a fellowship in, and the mastership of, the latter. If the Merton theory finds a powerful support in our imagi- nation when we reflect upon the natural sequence of a Wiclif at the College of Duns Scotus, Ockham, and Bradwardine, and in which no less than three Primates of his period had their breeding, and, again, upon the natural connection between Wiclif's opposition to " the religious," and the collegiate life which nursed such opposition by the very fact of the statutable conditions of the institution, we must also remember that the elevated standard formed by his great predecessors affected the whole University body in those days far more readily than we can now conceive under a system which, for many centuries, has been collegiate ; and it is also possible that the abuses forced on the attention of the non -collegiate students by the condi- tion of the " reKgious " in Oxford may have had * Eogers on Prices, p. 23. 54 LECTURE II. even a greater effect on him than if he had been housed in the rising colleges specially established for the pro- tection of the secular clergy. At any rate we are on firm ground when we identify "Wiclif with the college system, as Master of Balliol in 1360 — 62 ; and Dr. Ijorimer has eyen advanced some strong, but not con- clusive, reasons for the supposition that he had always been a Balliol man. Whatever may have been the previous facts, it is from this time (1360) that we may certainly credit him with a full share in all the collegiate influences of the period, and in the interests which connected the secular clergy with that system by the country livings attached to colleges. We can understand his joint relations to the college living of Fylingham, in Lincolnshire, and to the headship of his college, his resignation of the latter ofEce when his "year of grace " had expired in 1362, and his subse- quent residences in Oxford at Queen's, under license of non-residence at his living during Term. All this is just what we might witness at the present moment. It was part of his final education at Oxford. It is also easy to understand how a man with these large and varied experiences would naturally have been selected in 1365, by Simon Islip, Archbishop of Canterbury, for the oiEce of Warden of Canterbury Hall. The balance of evidence, as has been said, is decidedly in favour of assigning this appointment to the Reformer ; and we may here accept it, with whatever inferences can reasonably be drawn from the circum- stance, when considered in all the lights which have been recently thrown upon it. Into the details we WARDEN OF CANTERBURY HALL. 55 cannot now enter. Suffice it tliat the Archbishop, whose Primacy had covered the most important part of Wiclif's long preparatory career, discovered in him precisely the man of "learning and good character," the man whose previous " fidelity, circumspection, and diligence " pointed him out for the extremely delicate position of warden of a new Hall which was to educate a new class of men. Islip was not a man of mark, hut he had done some- thing to meet the wants of the day. He saw that the pious zeal of those who complained of the abuses of the Church required to be trained and educated. He would have a new Hall for poor students of Canterbury under the wing of St. Frideswide's. His own See should give the name, himself hold the post of Visitor, and secular clergy alone should be the Fellows. But he unfortunately altered his original statutes and resolved to try to utilise the monks of St. Frideswide's by giving them the headship of the Hall and three out of the eleven Fellowships. Under that constitution the Hall commenced its career. This was just one of those theoretical compromises which so often fail. It would have been very well if monks had not been monks. Of course they could not agree with the secular clergy who were their colleagues, and WoodhuU, the Warden, was very far from the man to harmonize conflicting parties. In the course of four years the disputes had reached such a pitch that the Primate once more retraced his steps and superseded the four monks by Wiclif as "Warden, and three secular priests, Selby, Middleworth, and Benger. This was ^ 56 LECTURE II. too much for St. Frideswide's. A wliolly secular col- lege at their very gates was, as might be expected, a sore offence to the monks, especially as they had already had a taste of the government. Very soon afterwards (May, 1366) Islip died. No sooner was he in his grave than the monks moved heaven and earth, not, indeed, to obtain the restoration of the Hall to its previous condition, but to put an end to the quarrel by procuring the total expulsion of the seculars. Lang- ham, the new Archbishop, who had himself been a monk, played into their hands. Wiclif, after a war- denship of only a year and a few months, was, with his three friends, superseded by monks ; and soon after the rest of the seculars followed them. An appeal to the corrupt court of Rome at Avignon was not likely to be successful, especially when this same Langham, having (in 1368) forfeited his ofSce as Archbishop by accept- ing a Cardinal's hat, was thenceforward stationary at the side of the Pope Urban the Fifth, who, like Lang- ham, had also been a monk. The defendant had vir- tually become the judge. The blow thus given to the secular clergy by these two high-placed men was a heavy one. In referring to the transaction at a later date, Wiclif plainly alleges simony and " false represen- tations " as the means by which it was effected. It must be admitted that if his denunciations of the " monks possessioners " can be traced back to a date approaching 1366-7, when his expulsion took place, it would not be surprising if some connection between the two matters should appear probable to most men. And it is also observable that it was this very year. END OF WICLIF'S FIRST PERIOD. 57 1366, which witnessed Wiclif's first' appearance as a public writer on a great national subject, the claim of the Pope to English tribute ; that is to say, it is as "Warden of Canterbury Hall that he commences the new phase of his career. It would have been wonderful indeed if any pains were spared at Avignon to deprive him of the vantage ground in the controversy which he possessed as head of an Oxford House. He himself attributes the challenge now addressed to him by name to the desire that he might be punished by the Court of Rome and deprived of his ecclesiastical benefices. It should be observed further that Wiclif's Oxford residence is now no longer continuous. He had already, in 1363, commenced the practice of living in hired rooms at Queen's College, then recently founded, and resumes it after his periods of headship, first at Balliol, and then at Canterbury Hall ; but these later resi- dences are only, as far as we can gather from the records of Queen's, for periods of a year each, in 1375 and in 1380. After 1381 we hear no more of him at Oxford. It does not indeed absolutely follow that he was not residing in Oxford because we can only trace him in the years above mentioned ; but it falls in with other facts, if we now regard him (after 1367) as em- ployed more or less in national services which required his absence for considerable periods. The year 1366 or 1367 has been generally consi- dered an era in "Wiclif's life ; there is every reason for continuing to do so. The next ten or twelve years may 5 8 LECTURE II. •well be taken as a distinct period, coming at tlie end of his prolonged preparation at Oxford for the gigantic work he was to do in the world, and before the final period of theological conflicts, bold confession, and bitter per- secution which, lasting for six years, brought him to the grave in 1384. This may be called, speaking roughly, the political period of the Eeformer's life. We have no materials for tracing his course at this time with exactness throughout, but we have several well-known landmarks : and we shall do well to take a momentary glance at the still larger historical framework in which the picture has now to be set. Wiclif was, as we have said, if any one ever was, a representative Englishman. We have observed the coincidence of his Oxford training with the culmi- nating period of English grandeur, and the probable eflect of such coincidence on the formation of opinion in the mind of the keen-sighted Yorkshireman. It should also be noted that he was the follower of Ockham on the political and anti-Papal view of the questions of the day, the disciple of Plato, Aquinas, and Duns Scotus on philosophical questions. It was thus he trained his eagle eye for the true and noble theology of which he was to be the restorer and instructor to all the world. That he was thus eclectic in the best sense of the word, that he disdained to be tied down to the narrow limits of received systems, that he dared to think for himself and find his own way amidst the labyrinths of the Scholastic Philosophy, has not attracted suificient attention. If his works had SECOND OR POLITICAL PERIOD. 59 been collected and printed long ago, we should by this time have learnt to measure what such mental inde- pendence meant in the fourteenth century ; and as they are not even yet printed we may still expect to wait for the recognition. It is the scholar who has sounded the depths and calculated the heights to which the human mind can attain, under the influences which are only available to a man of moral and religious excellence, it is that man, and he alone, who, in an age of intellectual strife, feels himself impelled with a fear- less energy to go forth into the world around him to challenge all comers, and like St. John the Baptist, " constantly speak the truth, boldly rebuke vice, and patiently suffer for the truth's sake." The grandeur of the English position in the world had lasted during WicHf's training, but no longer. By the time he had become a public man there were unmistakable signs of EngKsh decadence. A feeble diplomacy was to take the place of the sword, con- stitutional struggles of victorious war. The year 1367 witnessed in Spain the battle of Najara, the last in which the English arms shone with their old pre- eminent splendour; and the concluding decade of Edward's reign was, we all know, as disastrous as the preceding period had been glorious. In such times of Weakness the Popes and their armies of ecclesiastics saw their opportunity for dealing with the too inde- pendent islanders. A precisely similar Papal Aggres- sion followed the collapse of Henry the Fifth's con- quests in the next century. It was in reply to Urban the Fifth's demand for 6o LECTURE II. arrears of the tribute which had been imposed upon King John, that "Wiclif had, at the request of the King and Council, or perhaps of Parliament, come to the front,* and drawn upon himself the personal attack of the anonymous writer whom he designates in his answer as " Mixtim Theologus." t It is from the tenor of that paper, together with some stray hints in other works, that Dr. Lechler has drawn the conclusion that Wiclif was for several years of this time an actual mem- ber of Parliament, + and that the expression he here used, to the effect that he was "peculiaris regis clericus," refers, not to his being a Royal Chaplain, as generally supposed, but to his summons to Parliament by Royal order as one of the six Masters summoned in 1366. That he held the position of Royal Chaplain has, indeed, only been maintained on the authority of the above words, and on the accusation by a con- troversialist that he was of the "house of Herod." The counter-theory is too positively asserted by the German professor, even though a Vienna manu- script, as yet unprinted, contains a statement of Wiclif's that he actually was in Parliament ten years later. That his name, however, does not occur in the list of " Magistri" summoned to any Parliament of the period is conclusive as to actual Membership. He * Fasc Zizan., p. 258. t This expression was translated by Dr. Shirley "the motley Doctor." (lb. 413.) Dr. Lechler has shown that Wiclif applied it to those defenders of the Papal system who mixed up the truths of God derived from the Holy Scripture with human traditions, as if they were of equal value. X Lorimer's Lechler, i. 211, 248. CONNECTION WITH PARLIAMENT. 6i was indeed summoned, in 1376, to attend tte King's Council,* when the conversation he reports may have taken place ; and it is quite possible that he may have been ordered to attend in Parliament on special occa- sions. Such a distinguished position would well fit in with the fact that he put forth at this period an harmonious view of the relations of Church and State, a view which deserves careful attention. It is the first attempt in the history pf English literature to deal with the subject on a great scale, and on fundamental principles. The theory of Dominion, of which some mention has been made in the previous Lecture, forms the keystone of Wiclif's position, taken up at this time, and main- tained throughout his life. It underlies the public documents which he now began to issue ; it guided him in his office of Royal Commissioner at Bruges ; it was developed in the fullest form in his grand Latin work, the " Summa in Theologia," which was written during the period now before us, and completed at the end of it. This vast compendium of thought may be taken to sum up the mature opinions of the man, the results of all the scholastic and political experiences of his whole life up to that date ; and of all his works, it is the one which it would seem most desirable to have in print before us. As yet it lies in MS. at Vienna. The views contained in it are nowhere to be met with in those works of Wiclif which are to be found in England, and yet they are essential to an understanding of the man. Dr. Lechler, who has supplied us with a * Stutbs' "Constitutional History," ii. 436. 6r LECTURE II. sketcL, tells us that we have in the three books of the " De Dominio Divino," which are preliminary to the " Sumnia," " the path of transition by which the author passed over from the philosophical to the properly theological period of his life and authorship."* Nothing can concern Englishmen more nearly, for in this transition he crosses the political stage. The " Summa in Theologia " consists of twelve books. The argument commences with the foundation of all human dominion, the Commandments of Grod, and advances through the next four books into the whole sphere of Civil Dominion, as founded on those com- mandments. Then comes the more strictly ecclesiastical portion, taking up the " Truth of Holy Scripture," the Church, the duty of the King, the power of the Pope, Simony, Apostasy, and Blasphemy. The more one reflects on the grandeur and vastness of the conception of this series of works, as sketched by Dr. Lechler, the sure foundation laid in the Divine Law, the gradual and logical unfolding of one portion of the subject out of the other, the independence of thought, and the majestic fairness of the treatment, the more irresistibly is one reminded of the similar work of Hooker, the great champion of our Reformed Church. t It is impossible that Hooker could have known * Lorimer's Lechler, ii. 50. t This paralleliem. between Wiolifs and Hooker's treatment of their subjects was written before the lecturer had observed the similar comparison made between the arguments of Bishop Pecock and Hooker by Mr. Churchill Babington, based on a remark of Hallam {Introduction to Fecock's Repressor). But it would seem that Wiolif beat deserves the comparison, suggested as it has been in the present Lecture by works probably unknown to the above writers. WICLIF ON CHURCH AND STATE. 63 "Wiclifs "Summa in Theologia." Both works are, no doubt, original. We are witnessing the coincidence of two great minds, nursed at the same Alma Mater, drawing from the same fountains of classical education, skilled in the same logical training, endowed with the same reverence for the Bible, and convinced that the errors they each witnessed around him could only be satisfac- torily dealt with by going back to the fountain-head, and inquiring what was really fundamental, and what were the accretions of human origin which had acquired such a hold on the minds of his contem- poraries. Of course, with an interval of more than two centuries lying between the works, it would be absurd to press the parallel too far. The " knight of romance among the caitiff brawlers" of Elizabeth's reign, as Hallam styled the great Anglican, has to cleave his via media through ranks drawn up on somewhat differ- ent lines from those occupied by the legions against whom the stiU greater Reformer stemmed his course. Hooker found the way already made by the acts of his predecessors, and only requiring judicious labour to clear away obstructions, skilfully interposed during the two previous generations. His was the consummate defence of, what the hand of power, representing the steady convictions of a nation trained by ages of experience, had already established, the unanswerable reasoning supplied to meet the scornful demand of those who insisted that the English Church Establish- ment was, upon grounds common to all Christian men, unreasonable. Wiclif, on the other hand, had to deal with the 64 LECTURE II. as yet unshaken Mediaeval Church, which had "ac- croached " to itself, not only ecclesiastical dominion over Christendom, but also, to an immense extent, civil dominion. The Bible to which Hooker and his opponents equally appealed, was untranslated when Wiclif wrote. There was no recognised common ground. The vast fabric of the Papacy overshadowed eVery relation between man and man. "What to Hooker's age was too plain to require argument had to be laid down with all the force of cumulative reasoning, and all the subtlety of an abstruse philosophy. Therefore, we must not expect to find a plain and, so to speak, easy treatise commanding, like Hooker's, our assent at every step. We are in an atmosphere of a difierent kind. We have to make allowance, to exercise patience, to recall ourselves to the conditions under which the combat proceeds. It is the cumbrous process of the ancient Court of Chivalry as compared with the simpler settlement of the modern duel. Yet in both writers we perceive, not only the same general characteristics of conception and execution, but it is worthy of all observation that we find precisely the same principles traced and defended from begin- ning to end. Even the very order in which they are marshalled is only difierent so far as one has to bring up his argument to the practical question of reform ; the other to defend reforms already made. In dealing with the objection made to Wiclif 's doc- trine of Dominion we have already become familiar with the way in which he traced it in the all-pervading feudal system of the day, as applied by the Church in WICLIF AND HOOKER. 65 its relation to the laity ; and since this system con- fronted him at every turn, we saw that he was bound to prove that men had inherent rights as citizens, the laity fundamental duties, independent of the Papacy, within the sphere of civil life. To clear the way for what seems to us so simple required an appeal to the nature of God, his omniscience, eternity, the idea of the Logos, "in whom the God-idea and the world - idea are immediately one," the creation, the govern- ment of the world, the laws of that government, the natural law and the natural dominion, the evangelical law and the evangelical dominion, the human law and the human dominion of force or compulsion. He shows that none of these have the feudal mark of " for ever " about them. That is the property of the Divine Dominion alone. Man is not man except under the condition of freedom of the will, and he is indi- vidually and independently responsible for his obedi- ence to this Divine Dominion. For his guidance he has the light of Scripture, in addition to, and concur- rently with, his enlightened reason ; he has Christ the God-man, his only Mediator and Head, for the centre of humanity, incomparably above the human so-called head of the Church ; he has the Church of his baptism, consisting of the whole body of believers, the general priesthood of the elect, as the channel of Divine Grace. Thus there is liberty of conscience ; thus every Chris- tian is, in a sense, a theologian ; thus there is a univer- sal responsibility for the use of private judgment ; thus the laity have the right to withhold from clergy who fail in their duty the Church's revenues (a prin- 66 LECTURE II. ciple whlcli had, indeed, been laid down by Hilde- brand himself when he enjoined the laity to root out the marriage of priests). The clergy might become an utterly worldly body if the laity shrank from their duty.* If the Church officers, the clergy, would not reform themselves, the lords of the State, the rank and file of the Church, are bound to execute the reform ; but it is only as a desperate remedy. Yet was not the case almost desperate ? For himself he would spend his life in one great effort to lead back the Church to the institution of Christ. But the State must do its duty. The king as the head of the State is above all responsible; "he is God's vicar; every clergyman of the land, with his estate, is a part of His kingdom ; " t and yet individual Christians cannot repose their bur- den on king or nobles, pope or priests, monk or friar. Each must act as if all depended on himself. " To say that laymen are not entitled to sit in judgment upon the life and official conduct of their spiritual superiors, is as much as to say that it is not competent for the laity to concern themselves about their own salvation." + This appears to be the argument of "Wiclif's greatest series of works. Hooker's majestic argument is happily too familiar to require elaborate comparison with the foregoing. Yet let us exhibit a sketch of it side by side with Wiclifs. Who has not felt himself impelled to keep time to that stately, measured march, like men on their * Lorimer's Leohler, ii. 125. t De officio Regis, Lechler ii. 162. X 1)6 veritate 88., Lechler ii. 154. THE ARGUMENTS COMPARED. 67 ordinary business, overtaken by a regiment moving as one man to tbe musical rhythm of some well-practised military band? Who has not acknowledged at the end that the master has indeed kept faith with his scholar, when he claims to have "endeavoured through the whole body of the discourse that every former part might give strength unto all that follow, and every later bring some light unto all before ? " Here we find the similar steps which Wiclif had laid down for guidance, in the nature of laws, human and divine, the freedom of the will, and the right use of reason, together with a subtle analysis of the right use of Holy Scripture, which, however, as was natural, considering the interval of time between the writers, appears to ascend many degrees beyond the treatment of the subject by WicKf. So, also, while in the body of the work we may fairly balance the treatment of ecclesiastical afiairs, as suited to later times, against that of the early Reformer, we find Hooker carrying us just in the same waj^, through the difiicult questions relating to the offices of priests and laymen, on to the conclusion that ecclesiastical dominion or supreme authority is — "communicable unto persons not ecclesiastical, and most fit to be restrained unto the Prince or Sovereign Commander over the whole body politic." * " Till it be proved that some special law of Christ hath for ever annexed unto the clergy alone the power to make ecclesiastical laws, we are to hold it a thing most con- sonant with equity and reason that no ecclesiastical law be made in a Christian Commonwealth without * Preface to the "Ecclesiastical Polity." 68 LECTURE 11. consent of tlie laity as well as of tlie clergy, but least of all without consent of the highest power." * The Parliament of England, together with the Convocation annexed thereunto, is that whereunto the very essence of all government within this realm depends." " To define of our own Church's regiment, the Parliament of England hath competent authority." t And now having noted the principles of the Refor- mer's ecclesiastical polity, let us glance at the first political, the first concrete form of the great contention, as it appears in the reply to the " Mixtim Theologus " already mentioned, the curious and very able series of arguments against the Papal claim to tribute which profess to have come from the lips of seven lords of Parliament. + Dr. Lechler not only believes that the speeches are actually those of the lords from whom they profess to come ; but, as we have seen, that Wiclif was himself a member of the Parliament in which they were delivered, and in that capacity heard and reported them. On the last of these points we have said enough ; on the first it is obvious to re- mark that it does certainly, in order to accept the speeches as genuine, require a loftier faith in the intellectual eminence of English peers five hundred years ago than most Englishmen, even judging from their modern eloquence, will readily avow. Each ot the seven takes a distinct view of the case, neatly separated ofi" from the rest, not without a very clever vraiscmblance, and reasons it in the most concise and pointed way, leaving the Pope without, as we should * Book viii., ch. vi. 8. t lb. ch. ii. % This may be found in Lewis and elsewhere. WICLirS PUBLIC PAPERS. 69 now say, a leg to stand upon. Some of the sentiments are exclusively "Wicliffian ; the whole of them have received their colouring from him. In short, it is difficult to conceive of the speeches except as a mere machinery for the expression of opinions which it was convenient to put into the mouths of these men, opinions — on the right of the State to deal with eccle- siastical grants, and on the liability of the Pope to sin like other people — which only the boldest minds had as yet entertained. We need not, however, refuse to believe that some speeches of the kind had formed a basis for this thoroughly English document, so natural to the people who had not yet realised their fall from an Imperial throne. In the next place Dr. Lechler has discovered at Vienna a paper of "Wiclif's, hitherto unknown, refer- ring to a period a little later than this, and highly suggestive of the rapid progress of the English de- cline. It was not actually written till towards the end of the period we are now considering ; but it exactly expresses the feeling which had up to that time been gathering strength. The Pope had iadeed received a 'rebuff on the subject of Tribute, virtually decisive, though not, as Dr. Shirley supposed, actually final — ^for Gregory the Eleventh returned to the charge again in 1374 ; * but two years before the latter date this same Pope had sent one Arnold Gar- nier into England as Nuncio and Receiver of the Papal dues. There is nothing to show that this agent differed from his predecessors as to his actual func- * The English Works of Wyolif ; Matthew, p. vi., note 2. 70 LECTURE II. tions ; but the anti-Papal spirit of the country had subjected him to a novel species of oath, which, though he had taken it in the most public and formal manner, he did not choose to regard in a literal sense. This oath had bound him not only to be " true and loyal to the King, to keep the Council informed as to all letters. Papal or others that he received, and neither to send money out of the realm, nor to leave it himself without special licence, but also that he would neither himself do, or permit others to do anything which could possibly be displeasing and prejudicial to the King's Eoyal Majesty, his royal laws and rights, or to any one of his subjects."* Wiclif's paper, " Be juramento Arnaldi," is written to prove that he has broken his oath in almost every particular. He shows that the interests both of King and people have been grossly prejudiced, and that Parliament is only too well aware of the fact ; the poor have been robbed of their due ; the Church stripped of the alms given for its support ; the prosperity, of the kingdom seriously diminished ; God himself dishonoured ; Church services crippled ; the very nature of an oath depraved. All the usual prevarications on this point are tersely exposed, and the Pope is roundly declared " peccabilis." " Here," says Lechler, we have " the earliest germs of his later strivings for the Reformation of the Church." f We connect these two political documents with the fact which intervened between the dates of their publi- cation, Wiclif's Embassy, as one of the Royal Com- missaries, to Bruges in 1374. He was now, by the * Lorimer's Lechler, ii. 343. t lb. i. 225. EMBASSY TO BRUGES. 71 fact of ttis appointment, proclaimed, what lie had already for some time been, one of the leading men of the day ; and the principles for which he had become distinguished were doubtless, under the circumstances of this public employment, both strengthened and advanced. He took rank as second in the Commission, coming next after the Bishop of Bangor ; his zeal may be traced in his embarcation from London on the very day after the Commission had been issued. The object of this Embassy was to make a solemn protest against the Papal seizure of English patronage, of which Par- liament had vehemently complained in 1373, for which it now obtained no redress (we may be sure it was not Wiclif's fault), of which it complained again in 1376 and 1377, against which no Statutes of Provisors, however often re-enacted, were of any avail, and which never ceased tiU England shook herself free of the Papal yoke. The accidental circumstances of this mission, the greatness of Bruges, then the emporium of North Continental Europe, the exalted rank of the Papal Commissioners, and the concurrence of the negotiations for Peace with France, which, under the French princes of the blood and John of Gaunt, were proceeding at the same moment, have sug- gested to many writers the importance of the event in Wiolifs training. It has been compared to Luther's famous visit to Rome. To such a mind, so prepared, there was indeed everything present in this visit which could be required to ripen the process of reflection. He had the opportunity of watching the springs which moved the world ; the 72 LECTURE II. corruptions at the fountain- head, the Court of Avignon, were only too apparent. The anti- English spirit of France, and of the Papacy which was its mere creature, were exasperating to those who could not but re- member the days of Cressy and of Poitiers. John of Gaunt had just ruinously failed to make any impression on the ancient enemy of England, though at the head of the most magnificent expedition yet sent forth, and the English Government was only too glad to obtain a truce ; for Charles the Wise had, in fact, restored the national independence of his long-harassed land. No doubt it was here, at Bruges, that what had only been as yet the product of progressive thought, aided by patriotic feeling, grew to be the central idea which found place in the later writings of the Royal Com- missary. It was no sudden conviction, as most writers assume, which brought Wiclif to the front in connec- tion with the Papal schism of 1378, but a series of experiences and events leading up to that culmination, of which perhaps the most powerful was connected with the visit to Bruges in 1374. The more immediate and obvious result of this visit was, however, the acquaintance now formed — perhaps only ripened — with John of Gaunt. A few words on that connection and its consequences will complete our survey of the second period of "Wiclif's history. At this gloomy moment, with the old king nearly imbecile and the Black Prince in ruined health, John of Gaunt was occupying a much more distinguished position than the old chroniclers — who hated him for WICLIF AND JOHN OF GAUNT. 73 his support of Wiclif, or the modern writers whosei most praiseworthy love of the British Constitution blinds them to any merit on the part of those who tried to check its development — are in the habit of placing before us. In Godwin's " Chaucer," for example, a very different estimate of the Lancastrian prince from that which obtains nowadays will be found. Not that there is much in his character to excite admiration, or even esteem. The political side which he adopted would seem to most of us now, clearly the wrong one ; his moral character was not superior to the standard of the age ; and his want of success as a general seems to connect itself with his personal faults. But the Black Prince himself had lost everything he had previously gained by blunders of various kinds ; and in point of fact England was at last awaking to the discovery that her past successes had made her responsible for a task quite beyond her im- paired strength. John of Gaunt was at least the foremost English prince of the day ; Wiclif, the fore- most intellectual chief. The strong man who, with very short intervals, practically governed England for thirteen years, looked about for the strong. It was an alliance — accept whatever view we please of John of Gaunt's character — formed on the common ground of patriotism, and cemented by a common perception of ecclesiastical abuses. Papal tyranny, and French evil influence. That it was an honest and independent alliance on Wiclif's .part is indi- cated by his subsequent persistence in his own 'peril- ous course when John of Gaunt not only deserted 74 LECTURE II. him but used all his influence to suppress his indepen- dence. That the brave soldier and impetuous politician found himself at the head of the party to which Wiclif, his ally, was no doubt himself during several years op- posed, was an incident of that troubled and confused decade which requires special notice. At the risk of appearing to spend too much time on a by-issue we must attempt to understand the true nature of the phenomena. To find the key to the political complications of this remarkable time we must again emphatically call to mind the sense of distress occasioned by the contrast now presented to the previous grandeur of the reign of Edward the Third, — a weight which hung heavy at every English heart. The abuses which ranged parties on opposite sides were not new, but they pressed with tenfold force at such a time on a greatly thinned, im- poverished, and exacerbated population. Some of these abuses were perennial, and, as such, were, perhaps, felt more profoundly than any ; but, on the other hand, men had become accustomed to them ; they were standing grievances ; reform appeared almost hopeless, and many felt that the effort might be put aside for a time while different sections combined to deal with abuses the removal of which appeared to range within the limits of practical politics. Of this latter kind were the extravagance of the Court — far enough indeed from being novel — and the waste of enormous sums on so many expensive and bootless military expedi- tions. Those were the pressing subjects of the moment. There were the obnoxious persons visible POLITICAL COMPLICATIONS. 75 enough and close at hand, on whom vengeance might be visited, and hy whose overthrow relief might be gained. John of Gaunt, Lord Latimer, and Alice Perrers could be seen only too often and too promi- nently. And yet it was John of Gaunt who had been identi- fied with movements against the deeper grievances, the corruptions of the Church, the secularity of the clergy, the exclusive possession of the great offices of State by ecclesiastics, the immunity of Church pro- perty from regular taxation, and the Papal exactions. Wiclif and the Commons had marched along with him against these abuses. For a time they had succeeded. The vast wealth of the Church, which had to so great an extent escaped taxation in the midst of the terrible distress, and caused it to fall with such severity on the rest of the community, had yielded to the assault. But what protection was there for the future while ecclesiastics governed the land as trea- surers, chancellors, secretaries of State ? This fortress also had indeed, previously to the other, been carried by assault ; but only to be surrendered again imme- diately. "William of Wykeham and his coadjutors had for a short time been superseded by laymen, and lay- men were, perhaps, being already gradually trained for offices which, engaged as they had previously been in war and the administrative services growing out of war, they had not cared to fill ; but the movement was impotent and premature. The fact is that these men were scarcely as yet fit for the highest offices. The clergy had, by the best of all rights, personal fitness, mono- 76 LECTURE II. polised the posts of government all through the Middle Ages. Their resumption of office was almost a matter of course, and the Reformation found them still there. But the failure did not mend matters ; it only added to the sting of disappointment. The Papal Proyisions and the Papal exactions went on still ; and these eccle- siastical tyrants were still French Popes, tools of the princes so lately conquered, and now insultingly vic- torious. A long vista of continuous ahuse confronted the patriots, and yet there was a pressing duty to be done for which all such reforms must wait. Hence what took place. The ecclesiastics, under Wykeham's leadership, saw their opportunity, and placed them- selves at the head of the " Good Parliament." The Commons also saw that to work with them was their one only chance of a successful attack upon the imme- diate grievance. The Black Prince made a dying effort in their favour. The " Coalition," as we should say, carried everything before it for the moment, and its successful patriotism has given that Parliament a high rank in Constitutional History. But where was Wiclif ? We may, indeed, trace his influence in some of the petitions of this very Parliament, as we may also in some of the Acts of previous Parliaments of the decade. But he was evidently, as we should now say, " left out in the cold." He was pulled both ways. He would go with the Parliament against Church abuses, he could not go with the bishops who guaran- teed their continuance ; he would gladly have secured state economy and reform, but could not desert his old ally, who was his only hope for a permanent THE RIOT AT ST. PAUL'S. 77 Churcli reform. His sagacity was proved by tlie result. He could not expect any permanent good from the " Good Parliament." It turned out a failure ; while, on the other hand, John of Gaunt sank hut to rise again. Not so, as a politician, Wiclif. His political work was drawing very near its close. We are now ahout to enter on a new stage in his career. Thus when, after several fluctuations of incoherent parties had taken place, the time seemed to have come round for a new attack on the ever-obnoxious Prince, how could the bishops find a better avenue than through the side of the apparently forlorn "Wiclif? How could they wound the Prince more effectually than by robbing him of the support he had hitherto gained from the one man who was capable of giving it, and whom nothing would induce to let go his hold on the reforms which to him were a part of his life ? Thus, and thus alone, can we account for the circum- stances which confuse the student of history, and which no account of the events that has yet appeared has succeeded in clearing up. But no apology is needed for Wiclif. If his great ally resolved to accept the challenge which was distinctly ofiered him, and to place himself at St. Paul's by the side of one who sorely needed help, there is nothing in the alliance of which either had cause to be ashamed. It is sometimes forgotten that it required both personal and moral courage to confront Bishop Courtenay, surrounded by the fierce and independent citizens of London. No one could tell what turn they might take. Eegarded 78 LECTURE IT. as Wiclif was with favour by the laity generally, he had separated himself for the moment from the poKtical party which they were now favouring ; and the result, brought about by John of Gaunt's own reck- less wrath, showed that the Prince had interfered for "Wiclif at the risk of his life, and subjected himself to ruinous loss and serious disgrace. Physical force de- clared itself on the side of the bishops, and they found they could afford to be magnanimous. The greatest humiliation the proud Duke had to suffer was that he should owe the cessation of the riot to the equally proud Bishop of London. Perhaps it was not a greater humiliation than that William of Wykeham, whose character stands so high, should, almost at the same moment, consider himself reduced, to buy his peace with the Court by means of a bribe to the infamous Alice Perrers.* The times were much out of joint. We must in this Lecture assume that all are acquainted with the history of this weU-lcnown riot at St. Paul's, when John of Gaunt and Bishop Courtenay found themselves fairly matched against one another. They will remember that though Wiclif escaped in the general tumult, it was but for a few months. The Episcopate of England had reported his case to Rome, and one of the last acts of Pope Gregory the Eleventh was to arrange in the most complete manner for the trial of one who could no longer be suffered to delude the people, either from his place in Parliament, the pulpits of London, * Chronicon Anglite, pp. Iviii., 1S6, 137 : Stubts' Constitutional History, ii. 441. END OF THE SECOND PERIOD. 79 or the Doctor's ciair at Oxford. Five Bulls, issued at once, drew a net around the dangerous controversialist, from ■whicli there was to be no escape. The King and the E,oyal Princes, the Privy Council, the chief nobility, and the University of Oxford, were each and all to play their parts. How this also came to nothing, how the death of the old king invalidated one of the Bulls, how the University of Oxford contemptuously treated another, and how the citizens of London, return- ing to their old regard for Wiclif, saved him, with the help of the Princess Regent, at Lambeth — all this is matter of common history. It is enough that we are at the end of the so-called, political period, the last note of it apparently being a paper presented by Wiclif to the first Parliament of Richard's reign, in reply to a question which that Parliament had formally propounded to him, on the duty of the State to with- hold treasure from the Pope when it was required for the defence of the realm. This shows that for a moment he had yet again recovered the confidence of Parliament ; and that the question should be officially referred to him proves, like the similar reference at the opening of the period, what a position he had attained. From this paper, and from the nineteen propositions which had just at this time been selected by his accusers to the Pope, may be gathered the doctrines h© now held on the national relations to Rome ; * but they must in all fairness be taken in con- nection with his fuller writings, and read in the light of the language and institutions of the age. * Faso. Zizan. p. 258, 8o LECTURE II. Sufficient indication of what tbey really meant has already been given in this and the preceding Lecture. That these public Trials and riots formed another era in the Reformer's career is admitted on all hands. The crisis is the more decisively marked by the death of the Pope himself in 1378, and the commencement, before the close of the year, of that portentous Papal schism which determined the character of Wiclif's subsequent life. His varied experiences had now con- vinced him that he was called to play a yet greater part on the world's stage. Not a lesson had been wasted. His Oxford life, his political Struggles, had been of infinite service. If he had stopped here there would have been little to distinguish him from many other scholars and politicians. But he had discovered that he must appeal to the world in a wholly different manner ; and in the next Lecture we will try to make our way through some of the difficulties which have too generally obstructed a proper comprehension of the nature of that Appeal. It was one which shook the world, and its effects are as powerful at this moment as they were when its trumpet-tones aroused the sleepers. The resolution of the Church to crush the appel- lant brought matters to a crisis. The summons to the rulers of the State to reform the Church, by which Wiclif replied to that resolution, gave the distinct and audible keynote which the Councils of the fifteenth century took up. The Papal reaction which baffled those Councils was only so far successful as, by violently repressing the national energies for a time, to make their next effort irresistible. LECTTJEE III. WICLIF'S WORK ; HIS FINAL CONNECTION WITH OX- FORD; AND HIS REAL PLACE AS A REFORMER. It was as Rector of Lutterworth and Oxford Doctor of Divinity that the Bishops had arraigned Wiclif before the Pope, and made him the central figure towards which the eyes of all Englishmen were directed, and around which were grouped the pressing questions and controversies of the day. This Lutter- worth was all the preferment with which the dis- pensers of Church patronage could afford to reward such services as he had rendered ; he was glad enough to end his life without being deprived of it. He had indeed held at different periods three other prefer- ments : the rectories of Fylingham and Ludgershall through his College, and the Prebendary of Aust in the Collegiate Church of "Westbury ; the last, like Lutterworth, having been the recognition of his Royal Commissionership at Bruges ; but each had been re- linquished in turn, probably as interfering with the work he had been called to do in Oxford and London. No two of them were held together. No one ever accused him of grasping worldly goods. It is one answer to blundering accusations against G 82 LECTURE III. Wiclif for proclaiming revolutionary principles, that no one, even in that day, saw any inconsistency between his tenure of such preferments and his call upon the laity to reform the Church. No one knew better that the clergy must live, and that they ought to be so distributed over the land as to have a distinct work in each parish. All he required was that Church revenues, after the lapse of so many years, during which the intentions of pious founders had come to be entirely frustrated, should be readjusted. Perhaps no ecclesiastic had had more offices and preferments heaped upon him than William of Wykeham, his contemporary, and political opponent ; yet, beyond a supposed allusion to the secular employments which originally brought him into notice, and a word of friendly advice lest he should fall, while founding New College, into the error of Archbishop Islip in founding Canterbury Hall, not a word against him has been found in all WicKf's works. Wykeham's own College statutes may suggest a reason for this silence, if indeed one were required in the case of a man like Wiclif, who was above all personalities. That wise founder was himself a reformer of ecclesiastical abuses after Wiclif's own heart. The great administrator had set to work, as soon as he entered upon his episcopal office, to reform all the institutions in his diocese ; and he now declared with grief, that upon " a diligent examination of the various rules of the religious Orders and comparison with the lives of their several professors, he could not anywhere find that the ordinances of their founders, according to their true THE PRIMATES OF THE DAY. 83 design and intention, were at present observed by any of them."* But the humble nature of Wiclif's preferments can hardly be charged as a fault against the authorities. It is the penalty paid, and willingly paid, by really great men for being in advance of their age. They have their reward, but not in the usual, secular, way. Could the Princes and Bishops, who as yet were linked by every tie to the protection of the system so much of which WicHf had given up as hopeless, have ventured to offer him any higher elevation ? And if the prelates at the head of the English Church in Wiclif's time found it difficult to trust him, so neither were they the men to whom he could turn with any hope that he might repose on them any part of the burden which he felt himself called upon to bear. Dean Hook has judiciously remarked upon the peculiar needs of the English Church, which has always re- quired that safe and moderate men should be selected for primates. The fourteenth century for the most part illustrates this remark. With the exception of Bradwardine, whose noble career was cut short by the plague almost immediately after he obtained the mitre of Canterbury, the primates of Wiclif's age were mere commonplace men. Islip was little more than a practical lawyer; Langham, the monk, is only memorable for the expulsion of Wiclif from Canterbury Hall ; Whittelsey was a quietj worn-out man who had owed his position to Islip, his uncle ; Sudbury was a foi'eign-bred lawyer * Statut. Coll. Oxon. et Wint. 84 LECTURE III. and politician, whose one desire was peace. The last indeed, as proved by the famous story of the Canterbury pilgrimages, had certain sympathies with Wiclif's principles ; but this only brought into stronger con- trast the part he took, though reluctantly, in connec- tion with "Wiclif's trial. After Sudbury's tragic murder by the Boors on Tower Hill, Wiclif lived under but one primate more, and he exhibited a striking contrast to his predecessors. He gathered up, in fact, in his person all the characteristics which were most diametrically opposed to the Reformer's ideal. No doubt to him it seemed better that these high-placed men should content themselves, like Langham and Sud- bury, with the restoration of cathedrals, than that such a man as Courtenay should use his high birth and political influence for the suppression of reform. It is with him that we now have to deal. It would be diiEcult to imagine a greater contrast than was presented by Wiclif and Courtenay. They must have often met at Oxford before they faced one another in Parliament, at St. Paul's, and at Lambeth. The earnest student and laborious teacher, spending long years in gaining the standpoint from which he was to move the world, must have witnessed with some pain an undistinguished nobleman, his junior by many years, elected Chancellor of his University at the age of 25, and have deplored a worship of rank which was not very creditable to Oxford. Nor was it much better that the mere son of Lord Devon should be pre- ferred to the Bishopric of Hereford three years before the canonical age, and to that of London at 33.* This * Hook's Lives of tlie Aichbisliops, iv., 320. THE THIRD AND LAST PERIOD. 85 was in the very year (1375) wlien Wiclif subsided for the rest of his life into the humble position of Rector of Lutterworth. Who but can distinguish, when they met at Lambeth as judge and culprit, which was the superior, — the impetuous, unsteady, aristocratic Archbishop, or the " Evangelical Doctor ? " The period of Wiclif's life with which we are now concerned is marked by a distinct accession of hostility on his part both to the Papacy and to the Mendicant Orders. Hitherto he had been the national represen- tative in repelling Papal encroachments on English liberties. The Pope himself had been treated with respect. He even welcomed, till the experience of a few months opened his eyes, the accession of Urban the Sixth. But in 1378 the spectacle of the rival Popes excommunicating and preaching crusades against one another — crusades which were to be supported by In- dulgences, and for which Christendom was to be over- run by pardon-mongers — determined his half-formed opinions. The Pope was no longer only " peccabilis." It was something in that age to get so far as to the pos- sibility ; but now it was asserted that he had actually sinned. It was the eorruptio optimi. No long time elapsed before the Pope was "Antichrist."* * Dr. Buddensieg, by ■whom we may surely yet hope the serrice will be performed of giving Wiclif's remaining Latin works to the world, has pointed out in his Preface to the " He Christo et siio adversaria Antichristo," that a much more reasoned ground for Wiclif's attacks on the Papacy is to be found in this Tract (written in the last year, or last but one, of his life), and in others of his unprinted polemical works, than is commonly attributed to Wiclif, and that a vastly different impression from that which is left by extracts culled from different ephemeral productions will he thus derived. In this Tract we have tv>o '< Pn-nfi palled 'Antichrist ' only so far as he does, or leaves undone, 86 LECTURE III. So also witli the friars. We have already seen that his quarrel with them had been till recently attributed to a far earlier period than we now know to have been the true one. Wiclif was supposed to have been the successor of Archbishop Fitzralph (Arma- chanus) at Oxford, and the inheritor of the bitter contest which had raged between that controversialist and the friars. On the contrary it has now been made clear that he had, on account of their theory of poverty, distinguished between them and the " monks possessioners," whose entirely false position first attracted his indignation. Thus we hear of no objection on his part, even in 1376, to making common cause with the friars when five of their number attended in the train of John of Gaunt, their patron, for the purpose of supporting him on his trial at St. Paul's. Their learning, their teaching-power, perhaps his meeting not unfrequently with good specimens of the class, may have inclined him to toleration, even in spite of the hostility with which they were regarded in the University. Dr. Lechler has gone so far as to relegate the famous quarrel to the three last years of Wiclif 's life, and to connect it simply with the controversy on Transubstantiation which, commencing in 1381, brought the friars to the front. It seems, however, certain that the contemporary authority on which the Professor relies cannot be implicitly followed on this point. The publicity and bitterness of the quarrel may not have reached their climax till the date mentioned ; but expres- ATTACK ON POPES AND FRIARS. 87 sions of the strongest kind occur as early as 1378 ; and we have not far to look for a cause. It is doubtless to be referred to the effects of the Papal Schism. The friars were the very men to whom the collection of the Papal funds for the internecine Crusade was intrusted ; their ubiquitous presence in every diocese brought them under the immediate eye of the Rector of Lutterworth and his friends, with whom they had many a local quarrel ; their old trade in Special Prayers and Letters of Fraternity assumed a new significance amidst the pestilential outburst of Pardons and Indulgences; the old University jealousies could no longer be restrained. Their " religious " houses were now with Wiclif " Caim's Castles," * and they themselves limbs of Antichrist, spiritual manslayers, necromancers, ghostly adulterers. Strong as his language was, Mr. Matthew is no doubt justified in remarking that — " One of Wyclif's most marked characteristics lies in his essential moderation. Even when his language is most vehement the thought and purpose beneath it are sane and reasonable. When we go down to the kernel of thought we find no wildness. Whether the question at hand be one of doctrine or discipline, Wyclif has considered it carefully both in principle and in its practical bearings. It is this characteristic which entitles him to his pre-eminence as the first of the Reformers. Long before his time * This expression was an invention of Wiclif s. It was formed by puttiog together the initial letters of the four Mendicant Orders, the Carmelites, Auguatinians, Jacobites (or Dominicans), and Minorites (or Franciscans). That " m " had thus to do duty for " n" was too slight a difiScuIty to stand in the way of the device. 88 LECTURE III. there had heen heated sectaries who had denounced the whole system of the Church, but Wyclif was the first to submit it to a searching proof, to examine the pre- valent practices, and ask how it was they bent away from the ideal at which they ought to aim. In his conclusions he forestated in many points the judgments of the more moderate Reformers of the sixteenth century." * Thus while each section of his opponents had its own backers in its struggles with other sections, and, as we all know, the secular clergy, the monks, and the friars were engaged in a sort of triangular duel throughout the later Middle Ages — a circumstance which largely accounts for the success of the Reformation — Wiclif had gradually been forced by his conscience, and by the march of events, into isolation. This isolation was, as we have seen, synchronous not only with his escape from the two determined attempts to crush him, the one by the English prelates at St. Paul's, the other by the machinery they had, conjointly with Pope Gregory, put in motion at Lambeth, but also with his retirement from the service of his country in connection with Parliament. Under the light of this general survey many cir- cumstances in Wiclif's history, hitherto unaccountable, fall into their place. Isolated ecclesiastically and politically, the Rector of Lutterworth finds Oxford less and less suitable for even occasional residence, and he now commences a new method of reformation. Failing public and national channels, he will try what * English Works of Wyclif ; Matthew ; p. xU. THE BIBLE AND THE POOR PRIESTS. 89 c^in be done by tbe individual man, and take stock of the means still left at his disposal. With the ecclesi- astical world banded against him, and the lay .princes and lords daunted by the loud voice of ecclesiastical authority, he must attract the sympathies of the simpler laymen. He must go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in. Two mighty agencies suggested themselves to his service, the trans- lation of the Bible into the vernacular, and the " Poor Priests" who were to make it known. These have both been already noticed in a general way. We are not to understand that either started as full-blown projects at a particular moment of a particular year ; but it Is certainly most noticeable that we do not hear of either tiU almost this very date, 1378, while we find the first translation of the Bible finished, and the " Poor Priests " in full operation, in 1381. Perhaps, when we reflect on the significance of even the first of the above dates, and observe that there are but six years left before the Reformer's work is brought to a close by death ; when we reflect, also, that besides this gigantic labour of translation and evangelisation, it was during the same period that most of his important writings attacking the corruptions of Roman doctrine were composed and sent forth, the thought which most naturally arises is — how was all this possible within the limits of human power? Surely there must be some mistake, some confusion of dates ! Not at all. All modern research points to the same conclusion. We must account for it as we can. No doubt the explanation is mainly to be found in 90 LECTURE III. the inteuse energy, extraordinary power, and resolute will of the man, who felt he was drawing near the end of his life, and yet was not too old to apply with effect the lessons of experience which he had acquired in the course of it. There was, indeed, no time to lose. But the problem is more easy of solution when we re- member how much of all the later work was really prepared in the preceding years, a torrent ready to overflow long before, and only restrained by the block of circumstances. We may even imagine what a relief the overcharged mind must have experienced when the time had come at last for action. It might be compared to the effect of some spirit-stirring sum- mons to a final charge, after the patient waiting of an army under wasting fire which had lasted almost beyond endurance. In the great work already noticed as appearing in 1378, the " Summa in Theologia," we have seen that there are laid before us, as in a map, the principles arrived at during the systematic studies of a lifetime. What are the " Trialogus," the " Wicket," the hosts of Sermons which seem to come forth as if by magic after this date, but the legitimate and fearless application of those principles to the corruptions which their author had not previously persuaded himself he was caUed upon to attack ? It was three years yet before he ventured on the great assault of all, that on the doctrine of Transubstantiation ; but every day that passed since the Pope and the English Church began to treat him as a heretic, had done its work in convincing him that the charge must be retorted. If his so-called heresy AGENTS PREPARED AT OXFORD. 91 was only a return to that primitive faith from which his judges and their system had departed, it was high time that it should be proved. Every fresh examina- tion of their doctrines, every fresh chapter of the Bible he was translating, impelled him to press onwards in the course on which he had embarked, with the whole of his remaining strength. Let us again remark that it is more than a loss of time to attempt to dissociate "Wiclif's movements from their apparent causes, for fear of injuring his reputation by admitting the in- fluence upon his actions of a retaliating spirit. Even if it were so, it would only be to acknowledge the way by which, in the order of Divine Providence, designs for the good of mankind are generally worked out. If WicUf's constant preaching against the secularity of the clergy, and his support of Parliament in resist- ing Papal impositions and ecclesiastical immunities, had not pointed him out as a quarry to be hunted down, let us admit it as quite conceivable that the movement which purified the world in the siKteenth century would not have commenced in the fourteenth. Who can say whether it would have taken place ataU? This characteristic of Wiclif's movement, which may be compared to a building raised with exceeding suddenness and rapidity upon a foundation already secretly prepared, is to be most plainly observed in the translation of the Bible. That vast work was due to Wiclif himself in the originality of its conception, in the actual execution by himself of the New Testa- ment, and in the supervision of the whole of what was 92 LECTURE III. done by otliers. But it is now known with something like precision how much was due to his having gathered around him men like Hereford and Purvey, whose devotion to the work was only second to his own, and to the fact that such men, trained by the master, were ready to hand when required. Nor is it alone for this first gift of the English Bible to the nation, regarded as a chief engine of the Reformation,* that we have to thank Wiclif : it is now a commonplace to recognise the translation as an era in the English language. It is no longer Chaucer to whom is assigned a solitary place of grandeur in the establishment of the English which we even yet substantially speak. It was quite as much the result of Wiclif 's lifelong training in language, logic, and philosophy. Its adoption was insured by that English being enshrined in the Word of Life, which men gradually learnt to recognise as all-important for the present and future of the career of each individual soul. Chaucer's amusing stories, so felicitously descriptive of life'and manners, did their work with some ; Wiclif's Bible with others ; but the first only appealed to a Kterary class ; this to all. So also with that wonderful institution, the " Poor Priests." They did not spring out of the ground at a leap when Wiclif sent them forth at about the com- mencement of this latter period, each with a portion of the new translated Bible in his hand. They had been trained beforehand. Where ? No doubt at Oxford. They were graduates and undergraduates of Oxford whom he had gathered round him during the coiirse * See Forshall and Madden's Preface to Wiclif's Bible. OXFORD AND LUTTERWORTH. 93 of years, and formed into some sort of a School, a seminary of preachers, who multiplied and propagated their zeal to others. We have seen that the great teacher, rented rooms at Queen's for a year after his return from Bruges in 1375. This was the time of his fame, just the time when young and ardent students would have been specially attracted to the leading man of the day. It was also the year of his preferment to Lut- terworth. Hence the incipient connection; for Pope Gregory's Bull to the University in 1377 made Oxford, in spite of the large sympathy it evinced in his favour, a different place to "Wiclif from what it had previously been. He was now, indeed, a great man, but he was also a marked man. The University was nearly equally divided. He might well be glad to escape from a state of war, and retire to the country. Nothing could be more natural than that enthusiastic friends and fol- lowers, who probably commenced their operations from Oxford, should now contemplate the further extension of the persecuted principles under their master's direc- tion, and that Lutterworth, where he would now princi- pally live, should present itself as the central spot from whence they should go forth on their mission. At any rate, we are on sure ground in observing that the system was in full operation in 1382, as proved by Archbishop Courtenay's mandate to the Bishop of London, in which he denounces these " unauthorised itinerant preachers who set forth erroneous, yea, heretical assertions in public sermons, not only in churches, but also in public squares, and other profane 9+ LECTURE III. places ; and who do this under the guise of great holiness, hut without having obtained any episcopal or Papal authorisation." * These expressions mark a prevalence of the system which requires some few years, at least, to be assigned for its formation. We cannot then be far wrong if we connect the ascertained residence of Wiclif in Oxford, in the year 1375, with the commencement of the training of the Poor Priests, the last Oxford residence in 1380 with its completion, and the early part of the intervening period with the tentative experiments, which as soon as portions of the Bible were ready for distribution in 1378, or thereabouts, soon took a great development. Somewhere about 1380 we may believe it to have been spreading over a great part of England. Towards the later years of Wiclif's life, he devoted a large part of his literary labours to the furtherance of their work. His numerous English sermons, lately published by this University, appear to be sketches written for their benefit and use. That these itinerants were not unauthorised by Episcopal authority at first, but only when they had attracted great attention by their contests with the friars and by their circulation of the Scriptures, is tolerably certain. Dr. Shirley has remarked that " they were employed, under Episcopal sanction, through what was then the immense diocese of Lin- eoln, and probably in others also."t It was indeed perfectly natural that the bishops and secular clergy, who were themselves at constant war with the friars, » Wilkma' Concilia, 1832. f Fasc. Ziz., p. 40. WICLIF AND WESLEF. 95 should have welcomed men who came to do in reality what the friars were instituted for the purpose of doing, and for which they had been gladly accepted as long as they retained the impulse of their origin. Nor is there any trace for some years of any opposition on the part of these constituted authorities. It was only too generally recognised that the proper work of the regular parson was to perform the numerous and burdensome Church Services. The Dominicans had been by their very constitution "Preachers." The Franciscans had undertaken the functions of labour amongst the poor and the education of the rich. We know how they had degenerated. These Poor Priests were not to be a reproduction of what had so signally failed. They formed no new Order. The perfect simplicity of the institution was itself a stroke of consummate genius. Let us hear Wiclif describe these men. He speaks of his institution as a plan for sending forth good priests, formed on the model of Christ himself, not endowed, but living on alms in moderation so long as they behave well, earnest in the works which are suited for priests, such as preaching and prayer, and learned in God's laws, but abstaining entirely from all other sorts of works such as trade, hunting, and serving tables.* Dr. Shirley has remarked on their resembling in some degree the Jesuits, bu* far more " Wesley's lay preachers, such as they were while his strong hand was yet upon them." But they were not laymen at first ; and it is very doubtful if they * Fasc. Ziz., p. xli. 96 LECTURE III. were intended to be so by Wiclif himself. Dr. Lechler has, however, discovered some passages in the Vienna MSS. which seem to hint at his having sanctioned the mission of lay-preachers before his death. This is just one of those interesting cases into which we should gaia so much more insight if we only had the MSS. placed before us in print. The subject cannot fail to come home to us at the present day in reference to the comparison above sug- gested. The difference between the Wicliffites and the Lollards of a later date illustrates the difference between the Wesleyan Methodists as "Wesley instituted them, and the Nonconformists who preceded, sur- rounded, and broke away from the Methodists. In Wiclif s case, like Wesley's, both men proceeding from Oxford Colleges, there was no attack on the Church as such, or on Prelacy as such ; no levelling of ranks or attack on social institutions, no contempt of mar- riage by a priest, or depravation of sacramental grace. Wiclif and his Poor Priests were as distinct Church- men as the men of the established system, into the midst of which they projected themselves. So also were the first Methodists. Both Reformers willingly accepted the Church as the frame-work and organization into which fresh life was to be infused, nothing being de- stroyed but the accretions and corruptions. Both made their appeal to the Bible and the Primitive Church against the barren formalities on which men had learned to rest. In apportioning blame to the author of either movement on a review of its course subsequent to his death, we need only remark here that it is PLACE AS A REFORMER. 97 absurd to condemn either of them without such a con- sideration of the circumstances under which each was placed as is seldom accorded to the subject. Every one has ready access to materials for forming a judgment as to Wesley's course ; but with regard to Wiclif it is not too much to say that until the erils denounced by him and his Poor Priests were swept away there was no room whatever for Bible-teaching. There was no choice but to plough the ground, to excite men to the duty of removing obstacles, and at the same time to send forth those who would sow the seed. The whole force of the spiritual and temporal arms was holding down reform ; the people themselves must be reached by getting at them, as it were, underneath that pressure. But it is time that we attempted to mark Wiclif 's place as a Reformer of doctrine with something more of the certainty which modern research has afforded us than was possible only a short time ago. And yet it will be seen that, though we know so much more at the present day than Dr. James did in 1608, we shall not need to lay down any very different conclusion from that to which he arrived. Such a sketch will conveniently precede a final review of the Reformer's struggles with the Church and the Pope. In tracing the gradual development of Wiclif s attacks on the Papacy and the Mendicant Orders, it has been shown that the Papal schism of 1378 forms the natural boundary between a sort of acquiescence in both institutions, not without a strong desire to reform, H q8 lecture hi. and tlie distinct hostility which succeeds that era — which hostility culminates in a final period of vehement denun- ciation, beginning with the year 1381. The same three stages of development occur in the history of the con- troversy as to Tr an substantiation, though the transition period is not so strongly marked. Up to 1378 Wiclif seems to have acquiesced in the received doctrine ; after that year to be feeling his way towards a statement of positive truth which should evacuate the doctrine of its chief errors ; but in the year 1381 to have found his footing so firm that he deals with the question from all sides and in every possible manner, with arguments addressed to the learned, and chiefly to the friars, on the philosophical absurdities involved in the doctrinej and arguments addressed to the people, appealing to Scripture and the right use of their reason. It is now admitted that in no way has more injustice been done to Wiclif, both at the time and ever since, than in the advantage which has been taken of isolated expressions of his upon the above subject. No doubt his sayings are often inconsistent with one another, at any rate at first sight ; but then it must be remem- bered that the difficulty of reconciling the Scriptural statements in their entirety with one another, and with what we are obliged to believe on other grounds, has exer- cised every thoughtful mind in Christendom ; as also that while mystery above the reach of reason is postu- lated by belief in the Scriptures, it is as great a fault as unbelief to accept a superstitious gloss of man's invention which forces into the explanation any furthei miracle than is expressly revealed. ATTACKS TRANSUBSTANTIATION. 99 The conTiction that Transubstantiation not only cama under this latter head but lay at the root of nearly all the gross corruption which had overspread the Church ever since, as he termed it, Satan had been let loose {i.e. since the year 1000, or, as we should say, since the development of the Papacy favoured the growth of mediaeval corruption), had penetrated the whole nature of the Reformer. The place which Holy Scripture had now come by this very time (1381) to hold in the minds, both of himself and his fellow-translators and circulators of it, emphasised the attack on Transubstan- tiation. It was necessary to use very plain language. It was often unguarded. Such language requires to be balanced by equally well-attested statements of an opposite kind if we are to judge the controversy by the ordinary rules of fair play. Thus — to give only the slightest sketch — we have the most incisive passages in the two very late works, the " Trialogus " and the " "Wicket," against the blasphemy of the received doctrine that the priest makes the Body of Christ, as if a creature could make his Creator, as if God could be so dishonoured as to be created anew every day ; the adoration of the consecrated Host, the self-exaltation and deification of man involved in the doctrine, are vehemently condemned; the absence of real distinction between adoration and so called venera- tion ruthlessly exposed ; it is " the abomination of desolation," * it is Docetism. Yet no one can assert more strongly that nevertheless the Body and Blood of Christ are really present in the Sacrament ; that while * The " Wicket." 100 LECTURE III. we do not eat the body corporeally, we receive it spiritually, not by identification with the bread, or impanation, but by faith ; it is, as he repeatedly says, a " signum efficax." The difficulty of explaining the mode of the Presence is no greater in his system than it is in the Bible itself, or in the teaching of our own great di\'ines, as e.g. Hooker and "Waterland, or, we may add, as in the Articles and Formularies of our own Church. Indeed the doctrine to be found in the latter ig wonder- fully similar, if not the same, with Wiclif's ; for there seems to be little doubt that he limits the benefit of the Eucharist to the faithful receiver, while the unbeliever receives only the visible signs.* In short, like the doctrine of our Prayer-book, Wiclif's stand-point is neither Lutheranism, nor Calvinism, nor Zwinglianism. It neither denies the Presence, nor explains the mode. If the simple questions and answers of our own Church Catechism were expanded, they would seem to convey Wiclif's statements in so many words. What gives an appearance to the contrary is owing to the necessity of the circumstances which required the vigorous, persistent, and multiform asser- tion of negative doctrine, while the positive side is conveyed in words which cannot in their very nature convey an exact and definite impression. Thus while the Presence is called spiritual, figurative, sacramental, yet it is real. Christ is all-present, but in the Sacra- ment " distinctively, that is sacramentally." The Body of Christ does not descend from heaven to the * See Leohler ii. 191, 2, 3: and especially the quotations from a Vienna MS. in p. 206. WICLIF ON THE EUCHARIST. loi tread, for it is immovable ; it is not local. " It is the spirit that quiokeneth." If the words of consecration carry adoration and worship, why not worship the vine, since our Lord says, " I am the true Vine ? " — yet the Body of Christ, though not locally present, is in the Sacrament, as surely as the bread itself is there, which is not destroyed, but still bread. With him the Sacrament is a mystery, yet not a mystery to which any philosophical doctrine is applicable. Transub- stantiation, on the other hand, was a human invention', an innovation, a dexterous method of opposing Beren- garius, which had been favoured by the Church and supported by authority for three centuries, till all life had been eaten out of the Sacrament, and corruption had spread from the abuse like water drawn from a poisoned well. Again, corruptio optimi pessima. Hence it was not enough merely to write and preach sound doctrine on the Eucharist; the philosophical basis of the received doctrine must be refuted and exposed, and the consequences which flowed from its adoption must be made plain. Hence the denunciation of those who most specially defended the pnUosophical doctrine — the learned, the educators of youth, the leading opponents of himself and his followers, the men who met them at every turn, excited the Pope, the bishops, and the tlniversity against them, and would never rest till he and his friends were swept off the face of the earth — the Mendicant Orders. He or they must conquer. He accepted the challenge. .They prevailed for the time, thousands against one. His turn was to come. 102 LECTURE III. The received formula of the day for this doctrine was that the Sacrament is an accident without subject, or a quality without siibstance ; in other words, that the whiteness or roundness of the consecrated bread might be supposed to remain after the bread itself had ceased to exist. Against this statement, the parent of so many ills, he launches every weapon of logical proof, ridicule, and sarcasm. Here he is at home. His immense training in the disputations of the Schools, in which he was the acknowledged master, gave him coniidence in dealing with such questions. He exposes the absurdity of the paradox by a thousand illustrations. He carries the war into the enemies' country. They are the here- tics, he the orthodox. He is the follower of Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine, and other saints of Scripture, of revelation, and of reason.* Perhaps his favourite form of illustration was the following : — John the Baptist was Elias, but he did not cease to be John. Does a man cease to be a man when he is naked ? The bread is the Body of Christ, but it does not cease to be bread ; it is exalted, elevated to a substance more honoured. Let the heretics say what it is if it is not bread. Their heresy, he declares, arises from unbelief. Nothing is a more sure cause of unbelief. Transub- stantiation does in fact involve a denial of the Heal Presence. The Body of which Christ spoke is spiritual in the same sense as that used by St. Paul : — " In him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily." f " If we had a hundred of popes, and all the friars of the * ^' Trialogus," "book iv. ; F