Born, 1320(?). Educated at Oxford. Fellow, and afterwards Master of Balliol Coll. Rector of Fillingham, 1361–69; Rector of Ludgershall, 1369–74. D.D., Oxford, 1370. Rector of Lutterworth, 1374–84. Attended conference with Papal Legates at Bruges, 1375. Accused of heresy, 1377 and 1378. Forbidden to lecture at Oxford, 1381. Again accused of heresy, 1382. Engaged on English translation of Bible, from 1382. Died, at Lutterworth, 31 Dec. 1384. Buried there. Works: Wyclif’s translation of the Bible was published complete, ed. by J. Forshall and Sir F. Madden (4 vols.), 1850; “Select English Works,” ed. by T. Arnold (3 vols.), 1869–71; “English Works hitherto unprinted,” ed. by F. D. Matthew, 1880.

Personal

  By the institution of many, if they are indeed worthy of belief, deploring it deeply, it has come to our ears that John de Wycliffe, rector of the church of Lutterworth, in the diocese of Lincoln, Professor of the Sacred Scriptures, (would that he were not also Master of Errors,) has fallen into such a detestable madness that he does not hesitate to dogmatize and publicly preach, or rather vomit forth from the recesses of his breast certain propositions and conclusions which are erroneous and false. He has cast himself also into the depravity of preaching heretical dogmas which strive to subvert and weaken the state of the whole church and even secular polity, some of which doctrines, in changed terms, it is true, seem to express the perverse opinions and unlearned learning of Marsilio of Padua of cursed memory, and of John of Jandun, whose book is extant, rejected and cursed by our predecessor, Pope John XXII, of happy memory. This he has done in the kingdom of England, lately glorious in its power and in the abundance of its resources, but more glorious still in the glistening piety of its faith, and in the distinction of its sacred learning; producing also many men illustrious for their exact knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, mature in the gravity of their character, conspicuous in devotion, defenders of the Catholic church. He has polluted certain of the faithful of Christ by besprinkling them with these doctrines, and led them away from the right paths of the aforesaid faith to the brink of perdition…. Moreover, you are on our authority to arrest the said John, or cause him to be arrested and to send him under a trustworthy guard to our venerable brother, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Bishop of London, or to one of them…. Given at Rome, at Santa Maria Maggiore, on the 31st of May, the sixth year of our pontificate.

  In the ix zere of this king, John Wiclef, the organ of the devel, the enemy of the Cherch, the confusion of men, the ydol of heresie, the meroure of ypocrisie, the norischer of scisme, be the rithful dome of God, was smet with a horibil paralsie throw oute his body.

  On the day of St. Thomas the Martyr, Archbishop of Canterbury, that organ of the Devil, that enemy of the Church, that confusion of the populace, that idol of heretics, that mirror of hypocrites, that instigator of schism, that sower of hatred, that fabricator of lies, John Wiclif,—when, on the same day, as it is reported, he would have vomited forth the blasphemies, which he had prepared in his sermon against St. Thomas,—being suddenly struck by the judgment of God, felt all his limbs invaded by the palsy. That mouth, which had spoken monstrous things against God and his Saints, or the holy Church, was then miserably distorted, exhibiting a frightful spectacle to the beholders. His tongue, now speechless, denied him even the power of confessing. His head shook, and thus plainly showed that the curse which God had thundered forth against Cain, was now fallen upon him. And, that none might doubt of his being consigned to the company of Cain, he showed by manifest outward signs, that he died in despair.

  Hitherto the corpse of John Wickliffe had quietly slept in his grave, about one-and-forty years after his death, till his body was reduced to bones, and his bones almost to dust. For though the earth in the chancel of Lutterworth in Leicestershire, where he was interred, hath not so quick a digestion with the earth of Aceldama, to consume flesh in twenty-four hours, yet such the appetite thereof, and all other English graves, to leave small reversions of a body after so many years. But now, such the spleen of the council of Constance, as they not only cursed his memory, as dying an obstinate heretic, but ordered that his bones (with this charitable caution, “if it may be discerned from the bodies of other faithful people,”) to be taken out of the ground, and thrown far off from any Christian burial. In obedience hereunto, Richard Fleming, bishop of Lincoln, diocesan of Lutterworth, sent his officers (vultures with a quick sight scent at a dead carcase) to ungrave him accordingly. To Lutterworth they come, Sumner, Commissary, Official, Chancellor, Proctors, Doctors, and the servants (so that the remnant of the body would not hold out a bone, amongst so many hands) take what was left out of the grave, and burnt them to ashes, and cast them into Swift, a neighbouring brook running hard by. Thus this brook hath conveyed his ashes into Avon, Avon into Severn, Severn into the narrow seas, they into the main ocean. And thus the ashes of Wickliffe are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the world over.

  I know no person of ecclesiastical eminence, whose life and character have cost me more thought and care, than Wickliff’s. And after all, there is not much to record that deserves the peculiar attention of godly persons. I have consulted the best authorities, and in scrutinizing their contents have been mortified to find, that I could not conscientiously join with the popular cry in ranking this man among the highest worthies of the church. A political spirit, as we have seen, deeply infected his conduct.—It nevertheless remains true, that sincere Christians, and more particularly the protestants of all succeeding ages, are bound thankfully to acknowledge the divine goodness, for that there actually existed in the personal character of Wickliff “some good thing toward the Lord,” that such a character was providentially raised up at the very time it was so much wanted, and, that from his labours considerable benefit accrued to the church of Christ, both in England and upon the continent.

  We know not the number of sermons composed by Wycliffe, but that copies of nearly three hundred should have escaped the effort which was so long made to effect the destruction of whatever his pen had produced, is sufficient to assure us, that his labours as a preacher were abundant. His zeal was not of that spurious kind which assails the vast only, or which expatiates on the great and the future, at the cost of every nearer and more humble department of duty. Accordingly, to appreciate the character of the English reformer, it is necessary to view him, not only as advocating the claims of his sovereign before the delegates of the pontiff; as solving the questions which perplexed the English parliament; or as challenging the most intellectual of the age to discussions on the truth of his acknowledged doctrine. To all this he added the diligent performance of those less imposing duties which devolve on the parish priest. It was no novelty to see the venerable Wycliffe in a village pulpit, surrounded by his rustic auditory; or in the lowest hovel of the poor, fulfilling his office at the bedside of the sick and the dying, whether freeman or slave. It was over a sphere thus extended, that his genius and benevolence were diffused.

  To us he appears, for the most part, as a sort of unembodied agency. To delineate his character, in the fullest and most interesting sense of that word, would be to write romance, and not biography. During a portion of his life, indeed, he is more or less mixed up with public interests and transactions: but of these matters our notices are but poor and scanty; and, if they were more copious, they would, probably, do little towards supplying us with those nameless particulars to which biography owes its most powerful charm…. He stands before us in a sort of grand and mysterious loneliness. To group him, if we so may speak, with other living men, would require a very strong effort of the imagination.

  After the lapse of four centuries and a half, his memory is as fresh as ever; the very children in our cottages are taught to love their native place the better, because it was once his home, and afforded him a grave, and the simple announcement that we desire to “thank God for that which he wrought,” becomes a rallying cry for a whole neighborhood.

  Lutterworth is a small market town in the neighbourhood of Leicester. There the church may still be seen, where this great and early reformer of the English Church preached the Gospel of Christ crucified in its entireness and its simplicity. The very pulpit is the same from which he held forth the word of life to his people, and in the vestry is preserved the old oak chair in which, according to the tradition of the place, the pastor of Lutterworth died; this with a solid table, which is also said to have been his, came out of the old Rectory, when it was pulled down some fifty years ago. The church tower is a sort of landmark to the country round, standing on the highest spot in the immediate neighborhood.

  The German Reformers of the sixteenth century never accorded to Wycliffe that frank, impartial acknowledgment which was due to him, owing probably to the lack of accurate historical information. Between him and the Reformers of the Swiss school there is however a specific resemblance. This is true with regard even to personal character: pure intellect without, mythic, contemplative, romantic elements, overruling imagination and feeling, combined with a stern temperament like that of Calvin.

  In the pictures and representations that have come down to us, he appears as an old, thin, and slenderly formed man, while in some he is represented as having sunken features. He is dressed in the robe commonly worn by ecclesiastics at Oxford during that age, and carries a staff and book in his hands. In one portrait of him, which has only been recently discovered, his name has been carefully covered by the words, “Robert Langton;” and it is obvious that this must have been done by some friend and adherent, who wished by this device to save the picture during the period of persecution. From the testimony of all who came in contact with him, he must have possessed very remarkable powers of exhortation and persuasion; for, three and twenty years after his death, one of those who subsequently suffered martyrdom for adhering to his doctrines, declares that Wiclif was the first theologian of his age; while in the year 1406, the University of Oxford gave expression to its admiration of the man by declaring, that both in word and deed he was a true champion of the faith, untainted by the leaven of heresy; and that he stood foremost and without a rival among all who had either taught or written on logic or philosophy, or on ethical and speculative theology. His knowledge, his talents and his piety secured to him the esteem and devotion of all classes, whether high or low.

  It would be difficult to find another character in English history whose individuality is so thoroughly lost in his deeds as in the case of John Wiclif, the Reformer. We know him as the indefatigable Oxford student, as the humble parish priest, as the controversial disputant, as the first complete English translator of the Scriptures, as a voice which made itself heard in a dark time, as a witness for the pure Gospel of Christ when that Gospel was hidden from men’s eyes by the interpolation of many human errors and human vices; as the philosopher, the divine, the faithful Reformer of a corrupt Church, we know John Wiclif—but of the incidents of his life, of his origin, his childhood, his domestic being, we know nothing; and so great is the magnitude and so vitally important to the destinies of the country is the work which he accomplished, that the natural curiosity we have for prying into the interior life of great men is extinguished in the case of John Wiclif.

  The world lost in him one of the most sturdy heroes that the fruitful soil of England ever bore. The reformer of the fourteenth century does not belie his origin; we see it in that practical tendency which, with all his idealism, pulsates through his veins; in that measured boldness which marks all his doings. The great reformers of the sixteenth century throw his figure somewhat into the shade. Wyclif does not possess the genial vein of a Luther, nor the stern greatness of a Calvin. He does not rouse our enthusiasm like the former, nor impress us with fearful admiration like the latter. But he is, perhaps, better balanced than either, and unites many of their excellences, though he possesses these excellences in a less degree; the impression he produces is therefore weaker and less direct. On his contemporaries his personality exercised an irresistible fascination; but it is only, as it were, indirectly and by reflection that we can appreciate Wyclif to-day, while the names of Luther and Calvin arouse our imagination at once. In commendation of his character it is sufficient to say that he was one of the most moral, active, and courageous men that ever lived.

  It is but a melancholy picture which is presented to us of these Richmondshire Wycliffes, poor in purse, proscribed in religion, proud of heart, gradually fading away amongst the more substantial Northern Catholics, sternly repudiating the one strong member of their race who ranks with the great Worthies of England, and owing much of their later misfortune to the obstinacy with which they cherished the discarded faith. The last of the Wycliffes was a poor gardener, who dined every Sunday at Thorpe Hall, as the guest of Sir Marmaduke Tunstall, on the strength of his reputed descent. But five hundred years ago the family was anything but inconsiderable; and a lord of Wycliffe who renounced his lordship in order to embrace ecclesiastical poverty would enjoy a high reputation for that reason alone, both at Oxford and at London. We are not without evidence that John Wyclif made such a renunciation.

Translation of the Bible

  This Master John Wyclif translated into the Anglic—not Angelic—tongue, the Gospel that Christ gave to the clergy and the doctors of the Church, that they might minister it gently to laymen and weaker persons, according to the exigence of their time, their personal wants, and the hunger of their minds; whence it is made vulgar by him, and more open to the reading of laymen and women than it usually is to the knowledge of lettered and intelligent clergy; and thus the pearl of the Gospel is cast forth and trodden under feet of swine.

  It is a dangerous thing to translate the text of Holy Scripture out of one tongue into another…. We therefore decree and ordain, that no man henceforth by his own authority translate any text of the Scriptures into English or any other tongue by way of a book, pamphlet, or treatise; and that no man read any such book, pamphlet, or treatise, now lately composed in the time of Wyclif … upon pain of the greater excommunication, until the said translation be approved by the ordinary of the place, or, if the case so require, by the council provincial.

  There was another weapon which the rector of Lutterworth wielded with equal address and still greater efficacy. In proof of his doctrines he appealed to the scriptures, and thus made his disciples judges between him and the bishops. Several versions of the sacred writings were even then extant: but they were confined to libraries, or only in the hands of persons who aspired to superior sanctity. Wycliffe made a new translation, multiplied the copies with the aid of transcribers, and by his poor priests recommended it to the perusal of their hearers. In their hands it became an engine of wonderful power. Men were flattered by the appeal to their private judgment: the new doctrines insensibly acquired partisans and protectors in the higher classes, who alone were acquainted with the use of letters; a spirit of inquiry was generated; and the seeds were sown of that religious revolution which in little more than a century astonished and convulsed the nations of Europe.

  One of the most important effects produced by the Wycliffite versions on the English language is … the establishment of what is called the sacred or religious dialect, which was first fixed in those versions, and has, with little variation, continued to be the language of devotion and of scriptural translation of the present day…. In fact, so much of the Wycliffite sacred dialect is retained in the standard version, that though a modern reader may occasionally be embarrassed by an obsolete word, idiom, or spelling, which occurs in Wycliffe’s translation, yet if the great reformer himself were now to be restored to life, he would probably be able to read our common Bible from beginning to end, without having to ask the explanation of a single passage.

  The books which he wrote, so far as they were merely controversial books denouncing his opponents, may have some value for the ecclesiastical reader; but I should not care to notice them here; they would have left no stamp upon subsequent times, whatever they might have done for his own. But the book by which he really spoke to the hearts of the English tradesmen and farmers was his translation of the Bible. This was not an attack upon friars, but a living substitute for their legends and fictions. It was written in letters, but it came to the English citizens like a voice which was speaking to them rather than as something which was to be spelt out. It spoke to them as men busy in handicrafts, as men who had the earth to till and subdue. It spoke to them as husbands, fathers, citizens. It spoke to them as men, as having that in them which united them to the doctors and the nobles; to people in the times of old, to people in the farthest corners of the earth. As a mere translation, it is of only secondary value, for it is taken from the Latin. The worth of it lies in its English; it has fixed the language, it has become a ground of the literature. No other book could have been that—no book which did not address itself directly to the people, no book which did not come with an authority. I do not mean with an ecclesiastical or state authority—the ecclesiastics and the King forbade the reading of it—I mean with the authority which the people of Judæa felt when they stood about the mount, and One opened His mouth who spake to them, not as a scribe, but as a King.

  Wyclif’s translations of the Scriptures, as well as those of his time generally, were themselves made from a translation, the Vulgate of Jerome. Even if he had understood Greek,—he occasionally uses Greek words,—it is not likely that he could have found, in all England, a copy of the Greek Testament accessible, from which to make his translation. Copies of the New Testament manuscripts, and other manuscripts in Greek, were almost unknown in Western Europe until the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1543, and the consequent diffusion of Greek learning by the wide dispersion of Greek fugitives. The Hebrew of the Old Testament, too, was only known through the same Latin version…. Without doubt Wyclif used the text of the Vulgate current in his time, but, as we have reason to believe, in connection with it, he also collated such scanty Latin manuscript copies as were accessible. Considerable evidence has been adduced to show that he used a text which appeared to him after a comparison of old copies to be on the whole the most correct.

  The two great authors of this time are Wycliffe and Chaucer; and their influence upon the language cannot well be overestimated. To the translation of the Scriptures, completed about 1380 by the former and his disciples, we owe that peculiar religious dialect, alike remarkable for simplicity, for beauty, and for force, which we still see preserved in the more modern versions of the Bible, and which renders the prose of that work distinct from every other existing form of English prose. It is only through this translation that Wycliffe can be said to have exerted a lasting influence upon our tongue.

  We drink many a refreshing draught without knowing what mountain’s summit caught it from the heavens or what stream forwarded it to our cup. But that this man opened the Bible first to our English fathers we know; and our Christian days and institutions, and our noble literature are all saturated with the imperishable results of his toil. We cannot put it into words, we cannot even measure it in our thought. The Bible that we read to-day does not look to our eyes like the page of Wiclif; the men of the fourteenth century would have as great difficulty in reading it as we have in deciphering their rude and grotesque utterance. But his work underlies and supports the precious superstructure through which we walk as by still waters, or in which we lie down as in green pastures, even as the rough granite underlies all nature’s quiet beauty or impressive sublimity. The work of this man underlies the lisping utterance of the infant scholar who repeats “The Lord is my shepherd” in our own dear English speech, as that granite makes possible the nodding daisy or the flower of grass. And that work too is, as I said, in all our literature. It did more than anything else to form and fix our English speech. Your newspaper to-morrow morning would not have been possible without it. It was the seed out of which our libraries have grown. It has made the common mind intelligent. It has made the peasant the peer of the priest. It was the quickening of that national thought which has blossomed and fruited in Bacon and Milton and Shakespeare, in Mrs. Browning and George Eliot, in Thackeray and Hawthorne. Better than all this, it was the liberation of Christian faith and hope. It unbound these twin sisters to go whereever there should be English homes, to brighten and bless them; wherever there should be English toil, to dignify it; wherever there should be English graves, to tell of the Resurrection and the Life. In one final word, Wiclif’s translation of the Bible was, for the English-speaking race around the world, the second Resurrection. The day of its completion was the Easter day of the English language.

  Wiclif like many another man of genius, had not the minor gift of phrase-making; and the better English of his Bible was owing to his collaborators who possessed that gift. Wiclif with the rest of his knowledge, had self-knowledge; he knew his own defects and how to obviate them.

  It is impossible to overestimate the gift of Wycliffe to English prose in placing the Bible at the command of every common reader. But the value of Wycliffe as an independent writer may easily be exaggerated. If we compare his New Testament with the work of Nicholas of Hereford, we may conjecture that Wycliffe had a certain conception of style undreamed of by his wooden disciple. But his own manner is exceedingly hard and wearisome, without suppleness of form.

General

  Had it not bin the obstinat perversnes of our Prelats against the divine and admirable spirit of Wicklef, to suppresse him as a schismatic and innovator, perhaps neither the Bohemian Husse and Jerom, no nor the name of Luther, or of Calvin had bin ever known: the glory of reforming all our neighbours had bin compleatly ours.

  Dr. Caius had a mean opinion of John Wickliff, and therefore he thought the Oxonians ought not to be proud that John Wickliff was educated among them.

  Besides this defect of power in the church, which saved Wickliffe, that reformer himself, notwithstanding his enthusiasm, seems not to have been actuated by the spirit of martyrdom; and in all subsequent trials before the prelates, he so explained away his doctrine by tortured meanings, as to render it quite innocent and inoffensive.

  To complete our idea of the importance of Wickliffe, it is only necessary to add, that as his writings made John Huss the reformer of Bohemia, so the writings of John Huss led Martin Luther to be the reformer of Germany; so extensive and so incalculable are the consequences which sometimes follow from human actions.

  The merit of Wickliffe lay in seizing the favourable moment for disseminating his doctrine. In most of his principles he had been in a great measure anticipated, even by writers whose names are forgotten; but the profoundness of his learning, and greatness of his abilities, enabled him at once to take the lead, and thus gave to the sect the name of its champion.

  His philosophy and theology were closely interwoven: accordingly the antagonism of realism and nominalism entered deeply also into his theology…. We see in Wickliff the tendency of reform combined with an Augustinianism which went far beyond Augustin himself in its polemical hostility to everything that seemed verging on Pelagianism; to all worth or ability on the part of the creature; and which, in fact, amounted to the denial of free-will. A one-sided religious element in Wickliff here united itself with his stern speculative consistency: we meet with elements which in their logical evolution would have led to pantheism. Everything, according to his notions, enters as a part necessarily into the fulfilment of the decrees of predestination. This excludes all conditions…. It is plain that from Wickliff’s doctrine follow unconditional necessity, and the denial of free-will and of contingency…. The true protestant principle comes forth in Wickliff when he ascribes the whole work of salvation to Christ alone.

  He was indeed a man of massy, voluminous, and subtle knowledge; one who, with the intellectual sinews and skill to win the unbloody crown of the athlete, chose rather the sweat and toil and peril of the militant soldier. He had all the learning and agility of mind required for the calm contentions of libraries and colleges, so fruitful at that period in power and worldly honour. But did he, like so many among his contemporaries, thus employ his talents? Where shall we find, in any age or country, amongst the lowest ranks of vulgar fanaticism, a man more zealous to encourage and animate the consciences of the poor and ignorant? Is it not admirable to see that he, the doctor and philosopher of the old schools, introduced into the church the practice of that diligent and, as it were, rustic preaching, so especially designed and fitted to enlighten the lowly mass of the people? Nor was this adaptation of his own great mind to the needs of the weakest a small sacrifice in Wycliffe. For it is clear from his writings that, if ever there was any one who delighted in long and difficult trains of reasoning for their own sake, as giving pleasurable exercise to his faculties,—who loved to busy himself in the building up and compacting of scientific knowledge,—he was the man. Yet through these fine and immense webs of reasoning, how lion-like does he constantly break forth with some bold, direct appeal to that moral sense, which is the great practical standard of truth!

  The first, and perhaps the greatest of the reformers.

  In estimating his rank among the great intellects which have influenced the fortunes of mankind, we shall hardly, perhaps, be justified in assigning him a place with those who have been most distinguished for philosophic depth, or steadiness of judgment…. Admirable as he was, he seems to have been somewhat better fitted for the business of demolition than of building up. As the fearless assailant of abuse, nothing could well be more noble than his attitude and bearing. But, had he succeeded in shaking the established system to pieces, one can scarcely think, without some awful misgivings, of the fabric which, under his hand, might have risen out of the ruins. If the reformation of our Church had been conducted by Wiclif, his work, in all probability, would nearly have anticipated the labours of Calvin; and the Protestantism of England might have pretty closely resembled the Protestantism of Geneva…. It must plainly be confessed, that there is a marvellous resemblance between the Reformer, with his poor itinerant priests, and at least the better part of the Puritans, who troubled our Israel in the days of Elizabeth and her successors. The likeness is sufficiently striking, almost to mark him out as their prototype and progenitor: and therefore it is, that every faithful son of the Church of England must rejoice with trembling, that the work of her final deliverance was not consigned to him.

  Seems to have been the representative of every false principle of philosophy and every erroneous doctrine of theology current during this age throughout the Church of the West.

  It would be absurd to attribute this disaster to Wycliffe, nor was there any desire to hold him responsible for it; but it is equally certain that the doctrines which he had taught were incompatible, at that particular time, with an effective repression of the spirit which had caused the explosion. It is equally certain that he had brought discredit on his nobler efforts by ambiguous language on a subject of the utmost difficulty, and had taught the wiser and better portion of the people to confound heterodoxy of opinion with sedition, anarchy, and disorder. So long as Wycliffe lived, his own lofty character was a guarantee for the conduct of his immediate disciples; and although his favour had far declined, a party in the state remained attached to him, with sufficient influence to prevent the adoption of extreme measures against the “poor priests.”… With him departed all which was best and purest in the movement which he had commenced. The zeal of his followers was not extinguished, but the wisdom was extinguished which had directed it; and perhaps the being treated as the enemies of order had itself a tendency to make them what they were believed to be.

  It is not by his translation of the Bible, remarkable as that work is, that Wyclif can be judged as a writer. It is in his original tracts that the exquisite pathos, the keen delicate irony, the manly passion of his short nervous sentences, fairly overmasters the weakness of the unformed language, and gives us English which cannot be read without a feeling of its beauty to this hour.

  John Wyclif 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. He it was, who first, in the middle ages, gave to faith its subjective character. His first grand position was taken on the ground of faith…. His next step was, to maintain, that the only proof, by which we can establish a disputed proposition in revealed religion, must be deduced from the bible.

  When we consider the early period at which he appeared, and how strong a hold the doctrines which he assailed had universally obtained over the minds of men, Wycliffe must be ranked among the most remarkable of those who are entitled to the highest of all fame, that of being greatly in advance of their age.

  Whose writings contributed more than those of any other writer to the Great Reformation of the Church of England, and its severance from the Church of Rome a century and a half later.

  On the whole, we shall not misrepresent the position of Wickliffe, if we say that he began by being a comparatively moderate reformer in the Church to which he belonged; that his disapprobation of the doctrine, and practice of that Church, deepened as he advanced in years, and as different circumstances happened to place him in that attitude of hostility which is favourable to criticism; and that he ended by being, in all the most important particulars, a Protestant.

  The importance of what Wyclif did, and preached, and wrote, can hardly be exaggerated. His influence is felt not only among all the English race, but among all mankind, wherever the Bible is read, and spiritual liberty is valued…. It is easy to mark the faults in his character. They are obvious on the face of his own works. Wyclif’s writings are often deformed by intemperate and violent expressions, though never exhibiting the coarse savagery, with which, a century and a half afterwards, Luther and his contemporaries carried on their literary warfare. He was also in his controversial treatises somewhat given to mystical and far-fetched Biblical expositions and metaphors; although he recognised and enforced on others the principle of adhering to the grammatical and historical sense of texts, and of extreme caution in imposing a meaning on Scripture, which the Holy Spirit does not clearly command. The “root and branch” spirit, with which he assails existing institutions, appears sometimes to show a love of destruction, rather than a wish for reform.

  What shall we say in parting from Wiclif and his work? And first, with all due thankfulness to Almighty God that He raised up this witness for so much of truth, we, members of the Anglican Church, may be thankful too that the Reformation was not in his time, nor of his doing. From a Church reformed under the auspices of one who was properly the spiritual ancestor of our Puritans, the Catholic element would in good part, perhaps altogether, have disappeared. Overthrowing much, he built up very little. In that knowledge of Holy Scripture which by his translation he diffused among the English people, there were good foundations laid; but in the main we must see in him rather a clearer of the ground than a builder thereupon.

  The English church had up to the close of the fourteenth century been singularly free from heresy…. The first person against whom any severe measures were taken was John Wycliffe himself. He had risen to eminence as a philosophic teacher at Oxford. Although he was in the main a Realist, he had adopted some of the political tenets of the Franciscan Nominalists, and, hating the whole policy of the mendicant orders, had formed views on the temporal power of the papacy akin to those of Marsilius and Ockham, blending with them the ideal of apostolic poverty as the model of clerical life. As his opinions in the later years of his life developed rapidly, it is not surprising that he came to look on the sacramental system of the medieval church with suspicion and dislike, as the real basis on which papal and clerical authority rested…. His opinions regarding the wealth and power of the clergy were the occasion of the first attack upon him; the pretext of the second was his theory on the papacy; and he was not formally brought to trial for his views on the sacraments. Of the spiritual, the philosophical, and the political elements in Wycliffe’s teaching, the last was far the most offensive to the clergy and the most attractive to the discontented laity. In Wycliffe himself there is no reason to doubt that all the three were matters of conviction; but neither is there any reason to doubt that the popular favour which attended on his teaching was caused mainly by the desire for social change. Both he and his adversaries recognised the fact that on the sacramental system the practical controversy must ultimately turn; the mob was attracted by the idea of confiscation.

  It was in his pulpit, however, that Wyclif’s light shone out most brightly. Taking the lesson of the day, or some pointed verse of scripture, he would give short pithy explanations, attacking the old errors when they came in his way with keen homespun sentences, with many a sarcasm about Pope and priest as he went along, but trying most of all to bring out the practical lesson for the lives of his hearers. These little sermons, or lectures, were copied out and circulated among his followers far and wide, so that even at the present day there are no less than three hundred of Wyclif’s “Postils,” as they are called, still extant.

  A character like that of Wycliffe is an appearance rare in the history of a nation. Luther was not more resolute in his demand for freedom of the conscience, though he came four generations after; and Wycliffe was far in advance of him in the clearness and depth of many of his views.

  The importance of Wiclif, as seen from an age five hundred years later than his own time, is in no respect less imposing than it seemed to his contemporaries, in so far as they were not pre-occupied by party prejudice against him. But the judgment of the present time must needs differ from that of his own period, as to where the chief importance of his personality and work lay. To the men of his own age his greatness and his chief distinction lay in his intellectual pre-eminence. Not only his adherents, but even his opponents, looked upon him as having no living equal in learning and scientific ability—to all eyes he shone as a star of the first magnitude. But the reference in these judgments was entirely to scholastic learning in philosophy and theology; and along with scholasticism itself, Wiclif’s mastery as a scholastic lost immensely in value in the eyes of later generations. But we frankly confess, notwithstanding, that to our thinking this depreciation has been carried too far, and that Wiclif’s scientific importance is wont, for the most part, to be undervalued unduly.

  One of Wyclif’s most marked characteristics is his essential moderation. Even when his language is most vehement the thought and purpose beneath it are sane and reasonable…. But if we go down to the kernel of thought, we find no wildness. Whether the question in hand be one of doctrine or discipline, Wyclif has considered it carefully both in principle and in its practical bearings. It is this characteristic that entitles him to his eminence as the first of the Reformers. Long before his time there had been 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 prevalent practices and ask how it was they bent away from the ideal at which they ought to aim. In his conclusions he forestalled in many points the judgments of the more moderate reformers of the sixteenth century.

  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 this:—that in Wiclif we have the acknowledged “father of English prose,” the first translator of the whole Bible into the language of the English people, the first disseminator of that Bible amongst all classes, the foremost intellect of his times brought to bear upon the religious questions of the day, the patient and courageous 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 ecclesiastical 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 Lutterworth, 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, bearing that illustrious name, has been recently built in our suburbs.

  One whom this College, and the University of Oxford, may justly regard as the greatest of her sons.

  In relation to the religious movement connected with his name Wycliffe stands absolutely alone. What names of followers of his have lived down to the present day? Probably the only names known to the general reader are those of William Sawtrey, John Badby, and Sir John Oldcastle, the last being known because he took up arms for freedom of conscience, the two former because they suffered at the stake; but neither of them left any personal mark on the thought of the age. Wycliffe had no coadjutor or follower of any eminence in the world of letters. Perhaps the most learned of his disciples were Philip Repingdon and John Purvey, the reviser of Wycliffe’s translation of the Bible; but both of these recanted under pressure.

  The relation of Luther to these Reformers still remains extremely obscure. The Germans, it is true, repudiate any possible influence; but, when it is remembered that Germany was at the beginning of the sixteenth century honeycombed by Husite societies; that there is scarcely an idea or argument used by Luther, with the doubtful exception of the famous doctrine of salvation, which is not to be found in the works of Wiclif; that Wiclif’s “Trialogus” and innumerable works of Hus, or concerning him, were published in the early days of the Reformation by the Reformers or their friends; and that there is in existence at Vienna a Wiclif MS. inscribed “Doctor Martinus Luther”—remembering these things, there are obviously facts sufficient to demand a critical and impartial investigation.

  Persecutions in previous centuries Wycliffe nowhere seems to regret, nor does he give reason more than a subordinate place, but distinctly condemns those who claim a special inspiration enabling them to find a new and peculiar meaning in the Bible, as false disciples. He was no Mystic or rationalist, and his views of predestination resembled Luther’s and Calvin’s, but he did not hold their doctrine of justification by faith. His demand for liberty to read and expound the Bible, as well as his attacks on clerical endowments, the confessional, and the authority of bishops and popes gave powerful, though undesigned, aid to the cause of free thought; and his own special work for biblical authority was so well organized, as not to be interrupted by his death.

  Above all, he had opened a new well of authority in his translation of the Scriptures into English; and by his strictness of life, his courage, his subtlety in wit and argument, he had set ablaze a fire in men’s minds that could not be put out. This was the only bond of union among those who came after him—the claim of reason to assert a higher truth, which all good men felt, but which the Churchmen dared not allow.

  Towards the end of the fifteenth century there arose a teacher in England, who, like many other heresiarchs, was a victim to foiled ambition, and who, under the specious guise of reform, sowed broadcast in Church and State the seeds of revolt.

  In truth England may be proud of him, who at the same time was the founder of her later prose, a national politician, an unsparing assailant of abuses, a bold and indefatigable controversialist, the founder of a new religious order, the great Reformer who did not shrink from questioning the truth of the Roman dogma, who broke through the traditions of the past, and who, while bound in his whole teaching by the Word of God, became the great advocate of the freedom of religious thought.

  The career of Wycliff, indeed, belongs to the University quite as much as to the Church. It was as the last of the Oxford schoolmen, and mostly from Oxford itself, that he put forth his series of books and pamphlets on the relations of Church and State, on the subjection of the clergy to civil rule, civil taxation and civil tribunals, on pardons, indulgences, the worship of saints, transubstantiation, the supremacy of Holy Scripture, and other like topics, besides those abstruse scholastic themes which have lost their interest for the present age. During his earlier struggles, the open patronage of John of Gaunt, with the occasional protection of the Court, stood him in good stead, and enabled him to brave not only episcopal censures but Papal anathemas. His real strength, however, consisted in the influence which he commanded in the University itself and, through it, in the English people…. The spirit which he had kindled continued to animate the University for many years after his death. In Merton College alone several eminent fellows were known as Wycliffites in the next generation, and after the condemnation of Lollardism by the Council of London in 1411, it was thought necessary to pass a stringent University statue to check the propagation of Lollard doctrines. By this statue, the penalty of the greater excommunication was imposed upon all who should disseminate Lollardism, candidates for degrees were required to abjure it, and heads of colleges or halls were enjoined to exclude from their societies any person even suspected of it.

  This man’s works … have recently been reprinted; for there appears to be no ancient or modern heretic too absurd or too wild in his notions who may not obtain a band of noisy admirers amongst the shallow sentimentalists and fadmongers of the present day.

  The chief anarchist of his time.

  It may at least be said that he is the man who has left a broader mark on England and on Europe generally than any single man in the Middle Ages. Others have dominated the intellect of an age, or built up a wide-spreading system of government. Their work had long crumbled into dust; but Wiclif’s services to the human race can only be compared to an abounding river, receiving in its ever-broadening course the minor streams, but yet retaining from beginning to end the original impulse and direction. As the contemporary of Chaucer, the Black Prince, and Wykeham, he owed much, no doubt, to the elevation of the age in which his lot was cast,—an age superior to the twelfth century, if fruit is to be preferred to blossom; but it is as the inheritor of all previous ages that he stands before us unequalled and sublime.

  Wyclif was no mere forerunner of the Protestant Reformation, but the Reformer in chief. In the intellectual domain, in the field of ideas and of spiritual activity, he originated the movement which had its issue in the sixteenth century, when the Tudor monarchs rode but did not raise the storm. For one reason or another Wyclif was long excluded from his proper place in history; but the nineteenth century, bringing together for the first time all the main contemporary documents, has been able to take the true bearings of the epoch of religious reform.

  He was a worthy successor, as a philosopher of bold originality of thought, of the great English schoolmen, Duns Scotus and Occam, and, in piety and purity of life, as well as in literary skill, he rivalled his predecessor Bradwardine. But Wyclif was no mere scholar, “schoolman,” or dialectician. He was the hardest worker and the ablest statesman of the time. Tall and spare in form, of quick and restless temper, ready wit, and winning manners, the shrewd Yorkshireman, subtle in logic and eloquent in speech, was full of the energy and courage, the firmness of conviction, and the hatred of hypocrisy and wrong, that should be found in him whose life-work it is to attack abuses, to be foremost in controversy, to defy the world, if need be, in doing battle for moral, intellectual, and religious reform. The literary gifts of this illustrious man included a style now charged with persuasive power, and, in due season, keen in irony, and strong in the invective that pleases the popular taste. With all these resources he combined the worldly wisdom that enables the skilled politician and partisan to make every kind of man an instrument for his chosen work, and to refrain from playing into the hands of those who oppose him.

  Comparing Wycliffe’s style with that of the book of travels to which the name of Mandeville is attached, we see at once that his English is that of a scholar who has lost much of what may be called the childishness of archaicism, and who is ready to enrich his language with words borrowed freely either from a French or a classical source. We recognise that we are in the hands of one who, though he has nothing that could fairly be called a formed style, yet uses the direct and forcible English of a master, and whose example could not fail to influence the future of English prose.

  By a strange fate Wyclif’s posterity continued to flourish out of the kingdom. Bohemia had just given a queen to England, and used to send students every year from its University of Prague to study at Paris and Oxford. In that country the Wyclifite tenets found a multitude of adepts; the Latin works of the thinker were transcribed by Czech students, and carried back to their own land; several writings of Wyclif exist only in Czech copies. His most illustrious disciple, John Hus, rector of the University of Prague, was burnt at the stake, by order of the Council of Constance, on the 6th of July, 1415. But the doctrine survived; it was adopted with modifications by the Taborites and the Moravian Brethern, and borrowed from them by the Waldenses; the same Moravian Brethern who, owing to equally singular vicissitudes, were to become an important factor in the English religious movement of the eighteenth century: the Wesleyan movement. In spite of differences in their doctrines, the Moravian Brethern and the Hussites stand as a connecting link between Wesley and Wyclif.

  As regards his attitude toward the fine arts, Wyclif was no iconoclast: in his “Trialogus” an approved speaker points out that Christ did not condemn signs in themselves, but only abuse of them; the brazen serpent, the crucified Lord himself, were both signs. Nevertheless, in Wyclif’s nature the moral element was developed to the sacrifice of the ideal: his intense seriousness, his fear lest symbols should become to the simple occasions of idolatry, made him suspicious of the use of the arts in the service of the sanctuary, while his deep sympathy with the poor made him intolerant of the diversion of wealth that would relieve their necessities to the production of works of art.

  In England it was said at the beginning of the fifteenth century that every third man was a Lollard; and the first Parliament of Henry V. was so swayed by Wycliffe’s anti-clerical principles that the ecclesiastics trembled for their estates. But the renewal of the French wars drew the whole mind of the country in another direction; and the movement of Wycliffe, already compromised during his lifetime by its supposed connection with Wat Tyler’s agrarian revolt, was finally discredited when its leader, Sir John Oldcastle, was provoked in 1417 to take arms against his King. But though Lollardry was crushed, the influence of Wycliffe was never extinguished. As many as a hundred and fifty copies of Wycliffe’s Bible still remain; and there is no doubt that it was widely read by the common people, for whom it was written, throughout the fifteenth century. When, in 1510, a raid against heretics was made by Fitzjames, Bishop of London, so violent that Colet wrote to Erasmus that all the prisons were full of them, the articles in almost all cases stated that the accused possessed copies of Wycliffe’s Bible or of some of his works; and Erasmus, in his account of his pilgrimage to the shrine of Becket, at Canterbury, when he tells how his companion (Colet) questioned the advantage of such an exhibition of relics, represents his interlocutor as saying: “Who was your friend? Some Wycliffite, I suppose.” Thus the reformer of the fourteenth century joins hands with the reformer of the sixteenth.

  The interest which attaches to Wycliffe has grown deeper in recent years, as his writings have been more clearly studied, and especially his unpublished manuscripts. A sense of the greatness of his personality has increased, of his representative character as a comprehensive mind in whom his age found its most ample reflection. He went deeper also than his contemporaries could follow; indeed, his principles seem to ally him with the modern socialistic conception of reform. He appears at times to be one-sided and extreme in his passionate opposition to great evils imbedded in corporate ecclesiastical institutions. He was claimed by the later Puritans as their forerunner and representative, because of his principle of the parity of the ministry, and for other reasons, but in reality he belonged to another cause, the sacredness of the state and its organic relation to the church—that doctrine which has been the mainspring of what is highest and most attractive in English history, which was reaffirmed with deeper emphasis at the Reformation, and which still survives in the English Church, as one source of its strength, as that which differentiates it to some extent in principle from the other Protestant churches.

  The general effect of his conduct was to defeat, or, at least, to postpone, the realisation of his hopes. The authorities were alarmed, and adopted vigorous measures for repressing the new heresy.

  Wycliffe, in spite of some crudity of thought and utterance, was the only man of his age who saw deeply into the needs of the present and the possibilities of the future, and his life has had an incalculable effect on the religion of England, and through religion on politics and society.

  If ever man was, John Wicklif was in antagonism to his age, and he is certainly, in some respects, the most remarkable man of the century. From such a man, in character, in thought, in moral and spiritual feeling, John of Ghent was as far sundered as the poles. Yet, as often happens, they had some ideas in common, and events then, as in Reformation days, threw reformers and unscrupulous politicians into the same camp. John of Ghent was the aggressive enemy of an over-rich priesthood, an advocate of the encroachment by the State on the autonomy of the Church, and here the high-toned reformer and the crafty and ambitious man of the world were on the same plane. His connection with Wicklif was of long standing, and it is likely enough that he owed his nomination as one of the commissioners at Bruges to the duke’s influence. It was unfortunate that the spiritually-minded Wicklif became the protégé of such a man, though it is most improbable that he sympathised with much of the duke’s action. In the eye of the Church, at all events, he was identified with the interests of his patron, and that was enough for the duke’s clerical opponents to strike at the reformer. Their hostility was inspired as much by political as by theological animosity. To be original, independent, assertive against the abuses by which a large class earned its living, and hugged tradition all the more firmly in consequence, was in such an age a deadly offence. To be in addition, as these resentful dignitaries believed him to be, the duke’s tool, was the worst of all heresies. It is easy to see why they should single him out for uncompromising attack. It is likewise easy to understand how a man standing alone at bay before the enormous forces of convention and prejudice, would be only too glad to avail himself of such powerful protection as that of the virtual autocrat of the day.