Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/240

 from what we know him to have been if he could have seen anything less than Antichrist in the virulence with which an advocate of ecclesiastical poverty was attacked by the Vicar of Christ and by the English prelates.

How does Oxford bear the scrutiny of the nineteenth century in this connection, across an interval of five hundred years? Half a millennium has passed since the premier University drew to the close of her first golden age. For Wyclif Oxford was still the head-quarters of thought, and work, and love. It was to Black Hall in Oxford that he hurried, as soon as the session was concluded at Gloucester, in order to hold communion with his life-long—friends as another famous son of the English Church, in circumstances curiously contrasted, yet in a certain sense parallel with those of Wyclif at this crisis in his faith, went up from Littlemore in the memory of some who are still living, to see, as he puts it, "those familiar affectionate companions and counsellors, who in Oxford were given to me, one after another, to be my daily solace and relief; and all those others, of great name and high example, who were my thorough friends, and showed me true attachment in times long past; and also those many young men, whether I knew them or not, who have never been disloyal to me byword or by deed." Wyclif was approaching a mental and moral crisis quite as searching for him as that through which Newman had passed in 1843. His doubts on the subject of transubstantiation had already begun to take form and substance, and he must have felt that