Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/753

Rh WYCLIFFE 711 allowed the real presence of Christ in the consecrated elements, but denied any change of substance, a doctrine practically undistinguishable (unless by its scholastic form) from the modern Lutheran doctrine. The theologians of the university were at once roused. The chancellor, William Berton, sat with twelve doctors (half of whom were friars), and solemnly condemned the theses; Wycliffe appealed to the king, and John of Gaunt hastily sent down a messenger enjoining the reformer to keep silence on the subject. The condemnation at Oxford was almost immediately followed by the Peasants Revolt, with which it has been supposed that Wycliffe had something to do. The only positive fact implicating him is the confession of one of its leaders, John Ball, that he learned his subversive doctrines from Wycliffe. But the confession of a con demned man can seldom be accepted without reserve ; and we have not only the precise and repeated testimony of Knyghton that he was a &quot; precursor &quot; of Wycliffe, but also documentary evidence that he was excommunicated as early as 1366, long before Wycliffe exposed himself to ecclesiastical censure. Wycliffe in truth was always careful to state his communistic views in a theoretical way ; they are confined to his Latin scholastic writings, and thus could not reach the people from him directly. At the same time it is very possible that his less scrupulous followers translated them in their popular discourses, and thus fed the flame that burst forth in the rebellion. Perhaps it was a consciousness of a share of responsibility for it that led them to cast the blame on the friars. In any case Wy cliff e s advocates must regret that in all his known works there is only one trace of any repro bation of the excesses that accompanied the outbreak. In the following spring his old enemy William Courtenay, now archbishop of Canterbury, resolved to take measures for stamping out Wycliffe s crowning heresy. He called a provincial council at the Blackfriars in London, which assembled on the 21st May 1382, and sat with intervals until July. The council was met by a hardly expected manifestation of university feeling on Wycliffe s side. The chancellor and both the proctors stood by him. They allowed a Wycliffite sermon to be preached before the uni versity on Ascension Day. The archbishop s commissary complained that his life was not safe at Oxford. Still no steps were taken to bring Wycliffe to judgment. Twenty- four articles extracted from his works were condemned ; some of his prominent adherents were imprisoned until they recanted ; the university officers were soon brought to submission, but Wycliffe himself remained at large and unmolested. It is said indeed by Knyghton that at a council held by Courtenay at Oxford in the following November Wycliffe was brought forward and made a recantation ; but our authority fortunately gives the text of the recantation, which proves to be nothing more nor less than a plain English statement of the condemned doctrine. It is therefore lawful to doubt whether Wycliffe appeared before the council at all, and even whether he was ever summoned before it. Probably after the over throw of his party at Oxford by the action of the Black- friars council A r ycliffe found it advisable to withdraw permanently to Lutterworth. That his strength among the laity was undiminished is shown by the fact that an ordinance passed by the House of Lords alone, in May 1382, against the itinerant preachers was annulled on the petition of the Commons in the following autumn. In London, Leicester, and elsewhere there is abundant evidence of his popularity. The reformer, however, was growing old. There was work, he probably felt, for him to do, more lasting than personal controversy. So in his retirement he occupied himself, with restless activity, in writing numerous tracts, Latin and English, as well as one of his most important books, the Trialogus. In spite of a, paralytic seizure which came upon him in 1382 or early in 1383, he continued his labours. In 1384 it is stated that he was cited by pope Urban VI. to appear before him at Ptome ; but to Rome he never Avent. On the 28th December of this year, while he was hearing mass in his own church, he received a final stroke, from the effects of which he died on the New Year s eve. 1 He was buried at Lutterworth ; but by a decree of the council of Con stance, May 4, 1415, his remains were ordered to be dug up and burned, an order which was carried out by Bishop Fleming in 1428. At this distance of time Wycliffe s reputation is still a battle ground of parties. By those who uphold the indefeasible sanctity of church property, the exemption of the church from all control or oversight on the part of the state, or yet more the apostolic pre rogative of the Roman see, his political doctrine is judged as revolutionary, sacrilegious, and heretical. His denial of tran- substantiation is conceived to imply a base hypocrisy in his con tinued discharge of priestly functions ; but they who maintain this argument should bear in mind that the office of the mass is older than the doctrine of transubstantiation, and a man cannot be fairly accused of dishonesty in using words in a sense at all events nearer that in which they were originally written. A sober study of Wycliffe s life and works justifies a conviction of his complete sincerity and earnest striving after what he believed to be right. If he cannot be credited (as he has been by most of his biographers) with all the Protestant virtues, he may at least claim to have dis covered the secret of the immediate dependence of the individual Christian upon God, a relation which needs no mediation of any priest, and to which the very sacraments of the church, however desirable, are not essentially necessary. When he divorces the idea of the church from any connexion with its official or formal constitution, and conceives it as consisting exclusively of the righteous, he may seem to have gone the whole length of the most radical reformers of the 16th century. And yet, powerful as was his influence in England, it was but transient, and within forty years it was nearly extinct. His true tradition is to be found not in his own country but in Bohemia, where his works were eagerly read and multiplied, and where his disciple John Huss, with less origin ality but greater simplicity of character and greater spiritual force, raised Wyclitfism to the dignity of national religion. To Huss, whose works are to a great extent a cento of extracts from Wyclifi e, Luther owed much ; and thus the spirit of the English teacher had its influence on the reformed churches of Europe. The documentary materials for Wycliffc s biography are to be found in John Lewis s Life and Sufferings of J. Wiclif(nevf ed., Oxford, 1820), which contains orum (probably the work of Thomas Netter of Walden), 1858 ; and II. T. Kiley s notices in the appendices to the Second and Fourth Reports of the Historical Manuscripts Commission. Among contemporary records the recently discovered narrative of a monk of St Albans a bitter opponent of John of Gaunt is cf conspicuous value ; it was published under the title of Chronicon Angliie, by Mr E. M. Thompson, 1874. Of this the account in Walstngham s Hittoria Anylicana (ed. H. T. Riley, 1863, 18G4) is mainly a modified version. Knyghton, who wrote De Eventibus Angliie at Leicester in the heart of what may be called the Wycliffe country, is very well informed as to certain passages in the reformer s history, though his chronology is extremely faulty (printed in Twysden s Hist. Anglic. Scriptores Decem, 1052). There are valuable notices also in the continuation of the Euloyium Historiarum (vol. iii., ed. F. S. Haydon, 1863), in the Chronicle of Adam of Usk (ed. E. M. Thompson, 1876), and in more than one of the continuations of lligden. For the study of Wycliffe s theology the controversial works of Wodeford and Walden are important, but must necessarily be used with caution. Of modern biographies that by Dr G. V. Lechlei (Johann von Wiclif itnd die Vorgeschichte der Reformation, 2 vols., Leipsic, 1873; partial Engl. trans., by P. Lorimer, 1878, 1881, and 1884.) is by far the most comprehensive; it includes a detailed exposition of the reformer s system, based to a considerable extent on works which were then unpublished. Shirley s masterly introduction to thu Weil J-,yie S aCCOUIll- III HIS Jjl*iut y UJ lite u/dlt/oity VJ L/u/u/t* IJLUUU/, i*u correct our stock of biographical materials, and contain much valuable criticism. Wycliffe s political doctrine is discussed by Mr K. L. Poole (Illustrations of the History of Medixcal Thought, 1884) ; and his relation fo Huss is elaborately demonstrated by Ur J. Loserth (#&quot;? und Wiclif, Prague, 1884; also Engl. trans.) Wycliffe s works are enumerated in a Catalogue by Shirley (Oxford, ISCJJ). Tho following are published: -4. Latin. De Officio I astorali, ed. G. V. Lechler, Leipsic, 18(13 ; Triatogus, ed. G. V. Lechler, Oxford, 18G1); portions of the fSununa in Theologia, viz., De Cu-ili Dominio, i., ed. K. L. Poole, 188.5, ar.d De Ecclesia, ed. J. Loseith, 188(5; De limedicta Incarnatione, ed. E. Harris, 1S8G ; Dialogue sire Speculum Ecclesix Militantis, ed. A. W. Pollard, 188G ; Sermones, ed. J. Loserth, 2 vols., 1887-88; Polemical Tracts, ed. K. Buddensieg, 2 vols., 1883; De Compositione Hominis, an early work, ed. R. Beer, 1884. All but the first two of these arc issued by the Wyclif Society, which was founded in 1882 for the purpose of publishing all the reformer s unedited works. 1 Of Wycliffe s personal appearance we know hardly more than that he was a spare man with frail health. None of the existing portraits of him is contemporary.