Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/109

 predisposed to compromise. Is it not reasonable to suppose that the Oxford scholar with his secular sympathies, the man of affairs living and working amongst his own countrymen, the patriot and man of letters, would have been well satisfied to advance step by step—so that the advance was indisputable,—leading and not outrunning the spirit of his times?

An English clergyman before everything else, John Wyclif inherited the ideas of Marsiglio and Ockham without claiming the whole of his inheritance. Deeply sympathetic for his unfortunate fellow-countrymen, as modest and simple in spirit as he was, intellectually eager and ambitious, he aimed at being an orderly, a progressive, and yet an effectual Reformer. It was only after the defiance and exasperation of his enemies that he was forced into the attitude of an open heretic.