Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/254

 adopt a similar method, in the hope of re-awakening the conscience of Christian men and women. He could think of no better way of rousing the spirits of his ignorant countrymen than to put the Bible in the hands of devoted missionaries, and to bid them take it as their text whenever and wherever they could get an audience together. If he gave them any definite rules for their guidance beyond this, the rules have not been handed down to us. The mendicant Orders have preserved their constitutions, which strike one as being almost too elaborate to have proceeded from the original founders of those Orders. The constitution of the Russet Priests may have been from first to last an unwritten law, as simple as the earliest Christian commission on record—"Go into the world and preach the gospel." At any rate that is practically the limit of our knowledge concerning them—with one exception hereafter to be mentioned. We do not know when the first Poor Priest was despatched, nor how many were commissioned, nor where they went, nor what was the measure of their success. We know their work, but not their names. We recognise the tree by its fruits, and the best evidence of their probably life-long labours is to be found in the conspicuous and astonishing vitality of so-called Lollardism throughout the next few generations. The teachings of Wyclif and his missionaries, based upon a simple and familiar treatment of the Bible, which had hitherto been jealously and mysteriously