Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/29

 the character and career of John Wyclif, we might find none so close and continuous as that which is afforded by the biography of Knox, but at any rate there would be no lack of brief and partial reminders to show how the spiritual needs of successive generations call forth the very qualities which are required to satisfy them, and how in this way also the history of Wyclif has tended to repeat itself. The adventurous pioneer of the college cloister or university lecture-room, the innovating spirit of the tractarian or the homilist, the missionary zeal which organizes and sends forth an army of Christian soldiers, the hardihood which converts a simple priest into a politician, a socialist, a champion of the dregs of humanity—we too have known them all within the limits of a lifetime, and each in many varying forms.

Wyclif was neither a Wesley nor a Simeon, neither a Wilberforce nor a Newman nor a Booth, and yet there is a sense in which he combined the qualities of all these men, vastly as they differ from each other. The distinction of his multiple character arises from the fact that he stands forth so prominently in an age which forms a joint and hinge of religious history. He possessed nothing whatsoever of that which we now understand by the spirit of sectarianism. His claim was to be recognised as abiding in the ancient ways of faith, as upholding or seeking to restore the faith which Christ had founded, and which Christ gave no man the power or authority to change. Standing firm on such a basis, it was impossible that he should be a heretic, or a