Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/299

 one or two belong to the class of what may be called logical hyperbole. Certainly Wyclif held many or most of them, but it is equally certain that he would have condemned others. There is indeed a strain of greater optimism in these earlier Oxford heresies than Wyclif's mood and experience permitted him to entertain. He was a predestinarian, a believer in that "foreknowledge" of damnation which so easily becomes foredooming to damnation. He believed so strongly in the potency of evil that he thought God himself was constrained by it, and accordingly he could scarcely hold that punishment was other than everlasting. These important points of divergence should be borne in mind by and by, when we come to the melancholy stage at which many of the Reformer's disciples fell away from him.

Wyclif's return to Oxford in 1378 coincided, by a curious chance, with a discovery made by certain devout Christians at Dundalk, that the bones of his old friend and master Fitzralph were endowed with the power of working miracles. He had expressed a general opinion that miracles of this kind, wrought at the tombs of the saints, were not unlikely to be delusions of the devil; but we may be sure that if he thought them possible in any case he would be disposed to accept the testimony of the pious in regard to the doughty old Archbishop of Armagh—the Armachanus who was already a great authority at Oxford when Wyclif went up, and who certainly left his mark on Wyclif's character and opinions. Wyclif speaks of him with affection and reverence, and evidently accepted from him as a bequest not