Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/192

 one hundred thousand in London alone—produced new outbursts of religious enthusiasm, and contributed largely to the moral and intellectual development of the fourteenth century. The Black Death was the benefactor of society which it dissolved, and of humanity which it decimated. The plague of boils on man, the deadly murrain amongst cattle, the bloody spectacles of the Flagellants—all were on the side of free thought and the free expression of thought, for all encouraged counsels of perfection. There was enough already to set in motion the slowly grinding mills of God, from which even the fourteenth century began to witness the production of a new learning and a reformed religion. None of the older Schoolmen whose minds had restlessly stirred themselves in sleep—no timid student of Marsiglio and Ockham, plunged into a musing fit by reading those daring tomes, about the time when John Wyclif was conning his grammar at Oxford—could have dreamed that the mighty Church of Pius and Boniface would so accumulate its blunders and crimes at Avignon as to play the whole game into the hands of the heretics, and to render the disruption of Christendom finally inevitable. And surely one of the worst crimes of the Papacy throughout this blundering century was to exact, as Clement did, the jubilee pilgrimage to Rome in the midst of the most horrible pestilence on record, in order that he might win his expected sacks of gold at the cost of something like a million human lives. The Franciscans alone reckoned as many as thirty thousand deaths in consequence of this enforced pilgrimage.