Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/206

 where it did not imply the humiliation or impoverishment of the English Church. Wyclif would make no terms with the Papacy, which for him was (at its worst) antichrist and anathema. Both were staunch to a lofty ideal of the national Church of England; but they differed enormously in the model which they set up—differed by a space as wide as that which separates the barefooted apostle from the purple-clad prince of a dominant church.

Express complaints against Wyclifs teaching had reached the bishops, as well as the Papal Court at Avignon, soon after the Conference of Bruges. Of course it is not meant to imply that the bold doctrines of the Oxford Schoolman and lecturer in divinity were generally held to be sound up to 1376, and were recognised as heretical afterwards. His accusers were ready enough at the last-named date with a score of faulty instances, gleaned from his writings, sermons, and university lectures during the preceding years. No one becomes suddenly or accidentally a heretic; and the Oxford friars, who certainly hated Wyclif since 1366, if not earlier, had been taking notes of his teaching in anticipation of a day when they might find an orthodox corrector of his heresies. And they found such a corrector in the Chancellor whom they had attempted to hale to Rome, and whose authority they had defied.

Wyclifs heterodoxy, we cannot doubt, was an old affair—perhaps as old as his first association with John of Gaunt. But the actual persecution of "the Evangelical Doctor" began after the papal nuncios at Bruges had had an opportunity of hearing his incisive