Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/256

 work by Wyclif himself, or for its continuation by Nicholas Hereford at Oxford, John Purvey at Lutterworth, and their assistants. Nor would it be easy to say when Wyclif began to write for his contemporaries in English, or what is the date of his earliest English works which we now possess. But as to the motives which led him to translate the Bible for popular use, we are left in no doubt whatever. In a work, Of the Truth of Holy Scripture, written soon after his second escape from the hands of Courtenay, and before his English Bible was completed, he puts his case both clearly and fully. God's will, he says, is plainly expressed in the two Testaments taken together. Christ's law suffices for Christ's Church, without requiring the addition or substitution of another priest-made law, and the Christian who understands it has enough for his needs in this world. The direct message and voice of God to man in the words of Holy Writ, without any necessity for an intermediary—this was his "passionate conviction of truth"; and we can understand how such a declaration would shock the conventional orthodoxy of the fourteenth century.

In another place he lays it down that "Christen men and women, olde and young, shulden study fast in the New Testament, and no simple man of wit shuldebe aferdeunmesurably to study in the text of holy Writ. Pride and covetise of clerks is cause of their blyndnesse and heresie, and priveth them fro verie understonding of holy Writ. The New Testament is of ful autoritie, and open to understonding of simple men, as to the poynts that ben most