Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/298

 was born. If some of these errors were identical with errors that Wyclif subsequently held, the fair conclusion is that he imbibed them at Oxford as part of the mental sustenance which had proved to be best adapted to his intellectual growth and needs.

Archbishop Langham(1366-1368), who had been a monk, and was notoriously hostile to the mendicant Orders, wrote in the course of his primacy a disciplinary letter to Oxford in which he drew attention to the unsound views at that time current in the University. He mentioned a number of these—as that the baptism of infants is not a necessity for salvation; that no one could justly suffer damnation for original sin alone, without the reinforcement of wilful sin after birth; that there is a sufficient "remedy in nature" for the sins of true believers; that no one could be justly deprived of his heavenly inheritance for sins committed without a clear vision of God; that every human being has at least one clear vision of God before his death; that mere prohibition of an act is not sufficient to constitute the commission of that act a sin; that the Father in himself is finite, the Son finite, and the Holy Ghost alone infinite; that God cannot annihilate his creatures, or make something into nothing; that God cannot be a tormentor; that even Mary and the saints are still liable to sin and damnation; that, conversely, the damned are capable of salvation; that future punishments will not be everlasting; and that God could not create an absolutely impeccable being.

It is manifest that some of these tenets, sound or unsound, are at least as old as Christianity, whilst