indeed on the Continent, did not live to threescore years and ten, but,
being worn out with his exhaustive labors, he died peaceably and
unmolested in his retired parish. Not much is known of the details of
his personal history, any more than of Shakspeare's. We know nothing of
his loves and hatreds, of his habits and tastes, of his temper and
person, of his friends and enemies. He stands out to the eye of
posterity in solitary and mysterious loneliness. Tradition speaks of him
as a successful, benignant, and charitable parish priest, giving
consolation to the afflicted and to the sick. He lived in
honor,--professor of theology at Oxford, holding a prebendal stall and a
parochial rectory, perhaps a seat in Parliament, and was employed by the
Crown as an ambassador to Bruges. He was statesman as well as
theologian, and lived among the great,--more as a learned doctor than as
a saint, which he was not from the Catholic standpoint. "He was the
scourge of imposture, the ponderous hammer which smote the brazen
idolatry of his age." He labored to expose the vices that had taken
shelter in the sanctuary of the Church,--a reformer of ecclesiastical
abuses rather than of the lax morals of the laity, and hence did
different work from that of Savonarola, whose life was spent in a
crusade against sin, wherever it was to be found. His labors were great,
and his attainments remarkable for his age. He is accused of being
coarse in his invectives; but that charge can also be laid to Luther and
other reformers in rough and outspoken times. Considering the power of
the Pope in the fourteenth century, Wyclif was as bold and courageous as
Luther. The weakness of the papacy had not been exposed by the Councils
of Pisa, of Constance, and of Basil; nor was popular indignation in view
of the sale of indulgences as great in England as when the Dominican
Tetzel peddled the papal pardons in Germany. In combating the received
ideas of the age, Wyclif was even more remarkable than the Saxon
reformer, who was never fully emancipated from the Mediaeval doctrine of
transubstantiation; although Luther went beyond Wyclif in the
completeness of his reform. Wyclif was beyond his age; Luther was the
impersonation of its passions. Wyclif represented universities and
learned men; Luther was the oracle of the people. The former was the
Mediaeval doctor; the latter was the popular orator and preacher. The
one was mild and moderate in his spirit and manners; the other was
vehement, dogmatic, and often offensive, not only from his more violent
and passionate nature, but for his bitter and ironical sallies. It is
the manner more than the matter which offends. Had Wyclif been as
satirical and boisterous as Luther was, he would not probably have ended
his days in peace, and would not have accomplished so much as a
preparation for reforms.
It was the peculiarity of Wyclif to recognize occasional merits in the
system he denounced, even when his language was most vehement. He
admitted that confession did much good to some persons, although as a
universal practice, as enjoined by Innocent III., it was an evil and
harmed the Church. In regard to the worship of images, while he
denounced the waste of treasure on "dead stocks," he admitted that
images might be used as aids to excite devotion; but if miraculous
powers were attributed to them, it was an evil rather than a good. And
as to the adoration of the saints, he simply maintained that since gifts
can be obtained only through the mediation of Christ, it would be better
to pray to him directly rather than through the mediation of saints.
In regard to the Mendicant friars, it does not appear that his vehement
opposition to them was based on their vows of poverty or on the spirit
which entered into monasticism in its best ages, but because they were
untrue to their rule, because they were vendors of pardons, and
absolved men of sins which they were ashamed to confess to their own
pastors, and especially because they encouraged the belief that a
benefaction to a convent would take the place of piety in the heart. It
was the abuses of the system, rather than the system itself, which made
him so wrathful on the "vagrant friars preaching their catchpenny
sermons." And so of other abuses of the Church: he did not defy the Pope
or deny his authority until it was plain that he sought to usurp the
prerogatives of kings and secular rulers, and bring both the clergy and
laity under his spiritual yoke. It was not as the first and chief of
bishops--the head of the visible Church--that Wyclif attacked the Pope,
but as a usurper and a tyrant, grasping powers which were not conferred
by the early Church, and which did not culminate until Innocent III. had
instituted the Mendicant orders, and enforced persecution for religious
opinions by the terrors of the Inquisition. The wealth of the Church was
a sore evil in his eyes, since it diverted the clergy from their
spiritual duties, and was the cause of innumerable scandals, and was
closely connected with simony and the accumulation of benefices in the
hands of a single priest.
So it was indignation in view of the corruptions of the Church and
vehement attacks upon them which characterized Wyclif, rather than
efforts to remove their causes, as was the case with Luther. He was not
a radical reformer; he only prepared the way for radical reform, by his
translation of the Scriptures into a language the people could read,
more than by any attacks on the monks or papal usurpations or
indulgences for sin. He was the type of a meditative scholar and
theologian, thin and worn, without much charm of conversation except to
men of rank, or great animal vivacity such as delights the people. Nor
was he a religious genius, like Thomas à Kempis, Anselm, and Pascal. He
had no remarkable insight into spiritual things; his intellectual and
moral nature preponderated over the emotional, so that he was charged
with intellectual pride and desire for distinction. Yet no one disputed
the blamelessness of his life and the elevation of his character.
If Wyclif escaped the wrath and vengeance of Rome because of his high
rank as a theological doctor, his connection with the University of
Oxford, opposed to itinerating beggars with great pretensions and greedy
ends, and his friendship and intercourse with the rulers of the land,
his followers did not. They became very numerous, and were variously
called Lollards, Wyclifites, and Biblemen. They kept alive evangelical
religion until the time of Cranmer and Latimer, their distinguishing
doctrine being that the Scriptures are the only rule of faith. There was
no persecution of them of any account during the reign of Richard
II.,--although he was a hateful tyrant,--probably owing to the
influence of his wife, a Bohemian princess, who read Wyclif's Bible;
but under Henry IV. evil days fell upon them, and persecution was
intensified under Henry V. (1413-1422) because of their supposed
rebellion. The Lollards under Archbishop Chicheley, as early as 1416,
were hunted down and burned as heretics. The severest inquisition was
instituted to hunt up those who were even suspected of heresy, and every
parish was the scene of cruelties. I need not here enumerate the victims
of persecution, continued with remorseless severity during the whole
reign of Henry VII. But it was impossible to suppress the opinions of
the reformers, or to prevent the circulation of the Scriptures. The
blood of martyrs was the seed of the Church. Persecution in this
instance was not successful, since there was a noble material in
England, as in Germany, for Christianity to work upon. It was in humble
homes, among the yeomanry and the artisans, that evangelical truth took
the deepest hold, as in primitive times, and produced the fervent
Christians of succeeding centuries, such as no other country has
produced. In no country was the Reformation, as established by Edward
VI. and Elizabeth, so complete and so permanent, unless Scotland and
Switzerland be excepted. The glory of this radical reform must be
ascribed to the humble and persecuted followers of Wyclif,--who proved
themselves martyrs and witnesses, faithful unto death,--more than to
any of the great lights which adorned the most brilliant period of
English history.
AUTHORITIES.
The Works of Wyclif, as edited by F.D. Matthew; The Life and Sufferings
of Wicklif, by I. Lewis (Oxford, 1820); Life of Wiclif, by Charles Wehle
Le Bas (1846); John de Wycliffe, a Monograph, by Robert Vaughan, D.D.
(London, 1853); Turner's History of England should be compared with
Lingard. Mosheim's Ecclesiastical History; Neander's Church History;
Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Biography; Gieseler, Milner, and general
historians of the Church; Geikie's English Reformation. A German Life of
Wyclif, by Dr. Lechler, is often quoted by Matthew, and has been
fortunately translated into English. There is also a slight notice of
Wyclif by Fisher, in his History of the Reformation.
The name of the English reformer is spelled differently by different
historians,--as Wiclif, Wyclif, Wycliffe, Wyckliffe; but I have selected
the latest authority upon the subject, F.D. Matthew.