Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/103

 taught that human nature, on the other hand, is impotent for good, that the best deeds of men are unmeritorious, that everything worthy comes of the free grace and with the absolute foreknowledge of God. His teaching commended itself not a little to the men of his day, and Wyclif was deeply imbued with it. Chaucer re-echoes his fame, for he makes the Nun's Priest confess, on this capital distinction between predestination and free-will,

There is clearly a sense in which Bradwardine was a forerunner of the Calvinists, or rather of the earlier English predestinarians. A familiar passage in Paradise Lost describes the occupations of the fallen angels:

Of course Milton need not have been indebted to Bradwardine for any of his ideas, and yet it is possible enough that he had sat at the feet of the Schoolman. Sir Henry Savile printed the treatise against. Pelagianism early in the seventeenth century, and the omnivorous student was not at all unlikely to have seen this book.

William of Ockham died in 1357, the year in which Wyclif, according to some accounts, was made