Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/146

 ecclesiastical reforms through the secular authorities, just as these authorities must have expected to gain through him the alliance of a revolutionary party within the Church.

The bolder spirits of the fourteenth century who entered more or less consciously and deliberately into this combination, directed as it was towards the attainment of civil and religious reform, were not altogether without warrant if they began by nursing sanguine hopes of success. It was not for them to foresee that the destiny of England required her still to pick her dreary way through a chaos of mental darkness and desperate civil war. They could only realise their own regeneration, and anticipate the harvest of their own toil. The bright visions excited in ardent and enthusiastic minds in the age of the Plantagenets, by the lives of such men as Wyclif and Chaucer, by the growing vigour of Parliament, by the championship of Lancaster at his best, by the rich endowment and achievement of the universities, were not on the face of them more chimerical, more foredoomed to disappointment, than those which flashed before the minds of Englishmen in the days of the Tudors, as they witnessed the work of Cranmer, of Thomas Cromwell, of the Council of Edward VI., of John Milton, of the schoolmasters in the sixteenth century. If the disappointment of the earlier hope was predestined and inevitable, as the shapeless blossom is enfolded in the cankered bud, neither Wyclif nor John of Gaunt, nor any of the optimists of their generation, could have foreseen the abortive failure. How often in the history of our country have