Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/28

 with a passionate zeal for truth, half led and half followed the men of their day in a moral revolt against the later doctrine of Rome. Both, between the age of forty and fifty, came to be recognised as teachers of religious liberalism; both became king's chaplains and received the royal protection; both protested against the idolatry of the mass and the undue exaltation of the priestly office; both were repeatedly charged with heresy; both defended themselves with the utmost energy, and flung themselves into the path of danger in spite of threats and condemnations. Both stirred and inflamed their hearers in scathing sermons, and both were inhibited from preaching by their earlier patrons when they had served the turn of the politicians. Both were struck down, by apoplexy or paralysis, at the same age, and both died a couple of years later—Wyclif hot with indignation over the papal crusade, and Knox with his latest breath denouncing the massacre of St. Bartholomew's. And the same epitaph might be written over the grave of each—"Here lies one who never feared the face of man."

If there is nothing in such a parallel but a series of simple coincidences, still it may suffice to bring us from the very beginning almost into touch with the religious Reformer of the fourteenth century, by showing in how many essentials he was an antetype and counterpart of the enthusiast of the sixteenth century. Nor will it fail to suggest how near akin may be the pioneers of moral development in every age, even across the interval of five hundred years. If we were to look to our own day for parallels to