Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/30

 , or a sectarian. Rome might be heretical, and that is what he called her. The Papacy might be Antichrist, and he fixed the name upon it. Clearly he was right or wrong according as the ground which he took up was evangelical or anti-scriptural—according as he interpreted aright or misinterpreted the message of Christ to the world.

Wyclif and his friends were the earliest protestants, not because they revolted against authority, and wanted a church unfettered by authority, but because they went back to the first and strictest authority of all, and rejected its merely human accretions. They did not carry their protest backward for more than three centuries. They held by the Fathers, and the earlier councils and canons, repudiating the new dogmas and definitions which had been imposed on the Church after the first millennium of the Christian era. The position occupied by this fourteenth-century school of Oxford criticism was one of great dignity and weight, which the prelates of that age could not easily attack. Apart from the royal favour which was accorded to the Wycliffites for many years, it was impossible for the archbishops and bishops to prosecute with a light heart the most distinguished Oxford men of the day, who for a time seem to have been backed by a majority of the resident members of the university. It must be clearly borne in mind that Wyclif's standing was that of a doctor and professor of theology, an ex-master of Balliol, a brilliant lecturer and preacher, a king's chaplain, and a trusted adviser of Parliament. He was, in short, one of the