Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/100

 John Wyclif—who in his turn joins hands with John Huss and Jerome of Prague, from whom the torch was passed onward to the German and English Reformers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

It has already been said that Wyclif was a Schoolman by intellectual descent and training. At Oxford he imbibed the spirit and ideas of Bradwardine and Ockham, who were both fellows of Merton when he was studying for his degrees, and by whose writings, if not by their personal teaching, he must have largely profited. Bradwardine, who became Archbishop of Canterbury, and died of the plague in 1349, on the morrow of his admission to the temporalities of that province, was anything but a mere Schoolman, being not only a popular teacher at the university, but also a king's chaplain and a travelled man. He wrote scientific treatises on Proportion, on The Quadrature of the Circle, on Speculative Arithmetic, and Speculative Geometry, and on The Art of Memory. He collected his lectures (in Latin) under the title of The Cause of God against Pelagius, and concerning Causes in General, and dedicated the book to his friends at Merton.

Bradwardine has been claimed as one of the direct forerunners of the Calvinists, and he certainly frowned on the ideas of free-will, the merit of good deeds, the winning of grace by congruity, and so forth. "In the schools of the philosophers," he writes, "we rarely heard a word said concerning grace, but we were continually told that we were the masters of our own free actions, and that it was in our power to do well or ill." The "Profound Doctor"