Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/239

 Pope's Commissioners at Lambeth, to which we shall presently come; but it differs in its conclusion.

"This" he says, "is in some respect an answer to the bull. I want to be considered as delivering these conclusions like a grain of faith, separated from the chaff in which the unwelcome tares are burned, which tares, after their red blossom of malodorous revenge, provide materials for Antichrist against the genuine writings of faith. An unmistakable sign whereof is that a poison born of the Evil One reigns in the hearts of the clergy, a pride which consists in the lust of mastery, whose mate, the lust of earthly goods, begets children of the devil, whilst the children of evangelical poverty are extinct. You may judge of the fruitfulness of this procreation by the fact that many even of the children of poverty give countenance to the degenerate brood, either by speech or by silence, whether because they are not strong enough or because they do not dare, on account of the seed of the man of sin which has been sown in their hearts, or from a slavish fear of losing such temporalities as they have, to make a stand for evangelical poverty."

The tenour of the statement made by Wyclif to the University was very similar to this, and it is evident from the bitterness of the few sentences just quoted that the keen and natural indignation of the man could not be altogether suppressed. His moral and intellectual appreciation of the unchristlike attitude of the Christian Churches of his day, sensitive and palpitating as it was, had been stung to the quick. He would have been something very different