Page:John Huss, his life, teachings and death, after five hundred years.pdf/73

 presence. The other more important heresies ascribed to him were that a bishop or priest in mortal sin cannot ordain, consecrate, or baptize; that after Urban VI’s death the English church should acknowledge no pope but become independent like the Greeks and that it is contrary to Scripture for ecclesiastics to hold temporal possessions. Wyclif was inhibited from preaching at Oxford and was thenceforth confined to his parish of Lutterworth.

The chronicler, Walsingham, no doubt represented the official clerical opinion when he characterized the death of Wyclif as “the death of that instrument of the devil, that enemy of the church, that author of confusion to the common people, that image of hypocrites, that idol of heretics, that maker of schism, that sower of hatred, that coiner of lies, who, when he died, breathed out his malicious spirit into the abodes of darkness.” The dead was not left in peace. By Archbishop Arundel’s bidding, Wyclif’s writings were suppressed and by the Lateran decree of 1414 were ordered burned. And against his followers the English Parliament, in 1401, issued the law that heretics should be burned. The list of nineteen errors ascribed to him by Gregory XI grew enormously. The council of Constance accepted forty-five. Netter of Walden increased the number to more than threescore. An Oxford doctor of divinity, the Bohemian John Lucke, enlarged it to two hundred and sixty-six, and Cochlæus, in his work against the Hussites, to three hundred and three heresies, a weight heavy enough, it would seem, to crush the most callous of heretics and appalling enough to frighten away any good churchman.

Almost all the distinctive doctrines elaborated by the mediæval theology were cither questioned or flatly denied by Wyclif. He insisted that the Bible should be put into the hands of the people. It is the Book of Life—liber vitæ—the Christian Faith—fides christiana—the whole truth, the immaculate law. Its authority is supreme and its precepts to