less than qualifications like these could have succeeded in making an impression on the age in which he lived. It was an age of the blindest superstition and of mental and moral darkness. Neither religion nor society could hope for improvement while they were left to the teaching and guidance of the ecclesiastics of Popery. On questions of religion, almost everything they taught was an outrage on reason, and so accustomed were the people to the prevalent modes of thinking and speaking, that for an individual to deviate from them might well be considered quite a phenomenon. The adamantine chains of long-continued customs, were fast bound round the popular understanding. But Wickliffe commenced a war with the surrounding darkness and corruption. He saw the truth, and he loved it, and he laboured to show it to others. He snapped the chains of custom, cleared away from his mental vision the mists and clouds of the times, and called to his aid, not the canons of the Church, nor the doctors of the day, but the impartial thinkings, the stern conclusions, and the loud utterance of an earnest soul. He boldly determined to get clear of the mire in which Europe was then plunged, and, escaping therefrom himself, he resolved to extricate his countrymen. His earnest appeals and his cogent reasoning commanded the respect and enlisted the patronage of the court, and the principal man in the state-the famous John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster-made him one of his greatest favourites. Numbers, in all ranks of life, had their eyes opened, and became his followers; and, by his sermons on the Sabbath, and his writings on various subjects, he established an enviable popularity.* Wickliffe denied the doctrine of the "real presence." He knew that if he must question the evidence of his own senses, he could not be assured of the truth of anything. His eyes and his reason, to say nothing of Scripture, told him that bread was not flesh, nor wine blood, and he cast aside the stale cant of priests and monks. Besides this," he denied the supremacy of the Church of Rome, the merit of monastic vows:" and he maintained that the Scriptures were the sole rule of faith," that the mendicant friars were a public nuisance, that many of the ceremonies of the Church were worse than useless, and some say that he declared the doctrine of purgatory to be a Popish fabrication.

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While it is evident that Wickliffe claimed the liberty of thinking freely for himself, it will be equally evident that he was not wanting in moral courage. He was acquainted with the power of Rome, and he soon had to combat the rage of slander and the fires of persecution. The clergy rose in arms against the hard-headed doctor, and savagely entered the arena of theologic combat; while Pope Gregory XI. fulminated lustily against him, and issued a bull for the seizure of his person. He was cited before the Bishop of London, but Courteney failed to silence the Reformer, and he preached and wrote until he grew so popular, that, on a subsequent examination at Lambeth, the people rushed into the assembly and compelled his liberation. This movement

*The historian, Hume, though incapable of appreciating Wickliffe's excellences, calls him "a man of parts and learning;" and adds, he "has the honour of being the first person in Europe that publicly called in question those principles which had universally passed for certain and undisputed during so many ages."-Rich. II., vol. i., c. 17, p. 432.

of Wickliffe was a magnanimous attempt to break the power of Rome, and had he not been protected by the Duke of Lancaster, Lord Percy, and some others, the emissaries of the Papal see would doubtless have saved the Council of Constance the trouble of ordering his bones to be dug up and cast on a dunghill, and Fleming, Bishop of Lincoln, nearly half a century subsequently, of burning them, and casting their ashes into the Avon.*

At first Wickliffe had few to help him, but his fortitude was not to be overawed by the voice of authority, nor extinguished by the want of numbers. If he had little of the help of his fellow-countrymen, he was conscious that he possessed the weapons of truth, with which he bravely faced the rage and malice of the devotees of Popery. It is true, the world, even in the 14th century, was not without its great men, but they cared little for the sublime realities of religion. They were hunting after happy rhymes and harmonious numbers, with all that is excellent in poetry, and not the corruptions of Rome. Contemporaneous with Wickliffe was Chaucer, the first great English poet; and in the Italian Peninsula were to be found Dante and Petrarch. However, Wickliffe knew that the regions of the muses were not the regions for the creation of ecclesiastical reformers.t

It is not our intention to affirm that Wickliffe was absolutely without a defect. He was a human being, and had failings in common with humanity in all times and in all latitudes. But, on an impartial survey of his whole life, his defects were trifles compared with his excellences. His enemies pretended that in his confession he made an ignominious retraction, but all who fairly consider the circumstances of the times in which he lived, will easily excuse the apparent softening down of his language; and, especially, when they see that wherever in the confession he appears to make assertions bordering on belief of the Popish dogmas, he immediately, in order to save his conscience, cuts it down by a counter assertion.

The storm of persecution and the bulls of the Pope were not sufficient to silence the intrepid Reformer; and, if he was induced to qualify some of his assertions, he still retained a determined opposition. In his writings he called the Pope "The insolent Priest of Rome," the "Antichristian Robber;" and, in the work entitled "The Great Sentence of Excommunication Explained," he asks, “When shall we see the proud priest of Rome grant plenary indulgences to engage men to live in peace and charity, as he does to engage Christians to murder each other?" "He certainly continued," says Milner, " to the end of his days in the unremitted exercise of pastoral labours in his parish church of Lutterworth, though he persevered in attacking the abuses of Popery, by his

* In the year 1381 an Act was unfairly obtained by the clergy empowering sheriffs to apprehend preachers of heresy; but the Lower House complained of it as a fraud, they not having authorized its enrolment, and they demanded and obtained its repeal. But the craft of these men still enabled them to suppress the repeal. The law, however, was kept in the rear. Wickliffe was born in 1324, and died in 1384, three years after the passing of this law.

† It is true, notwithstanding, that Chaucer had his eyes open to the vices and gross superstitions of the times in which he lived. His "Canterbury Pilgrimages" show that he had no veneration for the Popish customs. The immoralities of the English clergy, and the corruption of the Papacy, had both come under his cutting satire.

writings against the mendicants, against transubstantiation, and against indulgences."

In nothing, probably, did Wickliffe more offend the hierarchy than his notions relating to Church property; and they sought to be avenged upon him by slander. They had long declared that his opposition to the Church originated in motives of revenge, excited by his expulsion from the office of Prior of Canterbury College, Oxford; and now they affirmed that he was teaching sedition in the Church. They openly declared that he was exciting the laity to seize its riches. The Reformer saw the wretched use made of the enormous Church emoluments, and he probably thought, and very correctly too, that it would be better to remove them at once, than they should be made the means of supporting a host of as corrupt and idle fellows as ever disgraced a State. One of the greatest evils that can afflict a community is the lodgment of a large proportion of its wealth in the hands of its useless members.

Wickliffe saw this, and he made an effort to save his country from the all-grasping avarice of a ruinous hierarchy. He cared not for their rage nor their slander. He defied their influence and their numbers, and he gave utterance to the convictions of his conscience, in spite of the fulminations of the bishops, and the bulls of the Pope. Tithes," says

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he, are not of divine right, because it cannot be proved from the Gospel, that Jesus Christ either paid or ordered them to be paid." A very just conclusion, in the man who respects the teaching and the authority of Scripture. He stated that it was an injustice that the laity should be so much oppressed, in order to pamper the luxury of a profligate priesthood. And though he maintained that a worthy labourer deserved to be well paid, he held the reasonable notion that, when the priest was a disgrace to his office by an immoral life, no one was under obligation to render "him hire." "As the laity," he said, "only pay tithes to be instructed in the word of God, there are many cases in which, according to the laws of God and man, the people may refuse to pay them.' 66 'However," he remarks, “a good priest ought to have a handsome maintenance." The system of tithes and church rates is little better than a system of legalized public robbery. Voluntaryism is the grand principle recognized in the New Testament, and Wickliffe, even in this dark age, had some faint glimmerings of this truth. However the clergy of the Establishment may attempt to hide themselves behind the law, we have no high opinion of the moral sense of that man who makes the law an excuse for robberies perpetrated in the shape of church rates, &c. According to our ideas of individual rights, although the laws of the State allow such breaches of the laws of modesty and morality, they anticipate a more than ordinary amount of hardihood in the party who shall feel at liberty to appropriate the advantages of so unwarrantable a privilege.

The cry of sedition against the Church did not succeed in silencing Wickliffe; and another was raised to the effect, that he was engaged in seditious practices against the State. If we were not aware that the votaries of the Papacy were always largely endowed with the inventive propensity, we might be surprised how a number of men-even Popish priests-could, in the absence of the slightest trace of reliable evidence,

*"Church History," vol. iv., p. 20.

invent such a slander. In the reign of Richard II., a somewhat formidable insurrection broke out in Essex, headed by the blacksmith, Wat Tyler; and Wickliffe was wickedly charged with being mixed up with this affair. The report does not appear to have been generally believed, and impartial historians have not thought it worth their while to record it. But Milner, to whom we have before referred, seems to have wanted much of the respect he otherwise might have had for Wickliffe, in consequence of the reformer's notions on church emoluments. It is a sad sin with the clergy to touch their revenues. Nothing makes a deeper wound, and no wound is so difficult to heal; and, though Milner is obliged to admit that Wickliffe "sought divine truth, and seriously endeavoured both to teach and practice it;" and further, "that the testimony of the best and most upright men who lived nearest his times, is unequivocal in his favour;" and that “there are undoubted proofs of his laborious and indefatigable cares in religion, of his sound comprehension of the essentials of Christianity, and of his general probity, integrity, and innocence of life," yet he says, in an insinuating spirit," that many of his disciples appear on the whole to have been better Christians than himself," and that he cannot "conscientiously join with the popular cry in ranking this man among the highest worthies of the Church." Though Milner wishes to make it appear that Wickliffe's inconsistencies, with respect to the peculiar doctrines he taught, were the ground of his suspicious remarks, yet we think from the general spirit of his strictures that the real grievance will be found to be in Wickliffe's teaching on church property. Modern churchmen, —not less than ancient priests,-hold it a very heretical opinion, that the laity have a right to withhold or give their support to the ministers of the gospel. That this is the historian's motive, is very apparent in several passages; and it becomes more than transparent, when at last, in a foot note, he openly excuses the vilest of his slanderers in the following ungenerous terms. He remarks, "It is not to be wondered at, that he who maintained that tithes were mere alms,' should be accused of supporting the seditious practices of Tyler, and other incendiaries, in the time of Richard II." We submit that Milner ought to have felt above the bitterness of giving currency to the meanest slanders of his fiercest enemies; and especially in the face-(we think this makes his unfair insinuations inexcusable)-of the high public testimonial given to Wickliffe's character at the university of Oxford, more than twenty years after his death. Such a testimony proceeding from such a quarter, is most honourable to Wickliffe. We give it for the satisfaction of the reader. The document is dated 1406, and reads, "All his conduct through life was sincere and commendable; his conversation, from his youth upward to the time of his death, was so praiseworthy and honest, that never at any time was there a particle of suspicion raised against him; and he vanquished by the force of the Scriptures all such as slandered Christ's religion. God forbid that our prelates should condemn such a man as a heretic, who has written better than any others in the university on logic, philosophy, divinity, morality, and the speculative arts."*

While Wickliffe preached and wrote against the idleness and luxury

* Milner's "Church History," vol. iv., c. 3., p. 20 -2.

of the clergy, he did not forget to set them an example of industry and temperance. If he associated with the highest personages in the realm, he was extremely abstemious, and attentive to his duties. His life must have been one of constant rigorous mental exercise. He felt that mental torpor and the Christian reformer were antipodes. His soul was fixed on a great work, and it did not shrink from the labour necessary to its accomplishment. He was indefatigable in attention to his pulpit duties at Lutterworth, nor did he neglect the obligations imposed upon him by the professorship at Oxford. His private studies were all but unremitting, and the information he is said to have collected was immense-sufficient to have made him, in that age, an intellectual prodigy.

His studious habits produced a number of well written and well thought books. Though after the Reformer's death the fires of persecution were kindled, and his books committed to the flames, yet copies multiplied. They were got abroad, and were not to be annihilated by bonfire rage. In 1410, four years after the issue of the testimonial to his character, his works were burnt at Oxford: and Subinco, Archbishop of Prague (1409), had a splendid fire with about 200 of his volumes. But this was the revenge of impotence. As well might they have attempted to burn out the light of day. The truths discovered by Wickliffe had an immortal destiny. They influenced thousands in England and on the Continent; and it is probable that they laid the foundation for the great work in the 16th century. The excessive labours and violent persecutions of Wickliffe brought on a dangerous illness in the year 1379, when a band of doctors were sent by the beg ging friars in order to persuade him to recant; but Wickliffe's usual courage, indomitable zeal, and sense of right, had not forsaken him; he caused himself to be raised a little on his pillow, and he exclaimed, "I shall not die, but live, and declare the evil deeds of the friars." The doctor prophesied truly.

Wickliffe's works are come down to us very imperfectly; some of them are entirely lost, and what is known of them is principally derived from the reports of his enemies. It is much to be regretted that the literary labours of this great man have not been preserved entire. It is abundantly evident, from the testimony of his contemporaries, and from that portion of his labours which remains, that Wickliffe did not simply declaim. He reasoned, clearly, severely, consecutively, logically. At Oxford, while he held his professorship, he was looked upon as an oracle; and the lectures he read there, are said to have borne plain marks of a vigorous intellect and extensive learning.

Wickliffe wrote a book, entitled, "The Complaints of John Wickliffe to the King and Parliament." This was directed against the begging monks-an order which became a social pest, and the reformer did not forget then to lash them in accordance with their deserts. In this work he expresses his views on tithes and offerings. Another of his productions is entitled "The Wicket and Trialogus," in which the reformer is said to display a brilliant and vigorous mind. It is written in the dialogue form, and the dialogue is conducted by Truth, Falsehood, and Wisdom. Amongst other things, he here combats the doctrine of the "real presence," the custom of praying to saints, and the practice of simony.