Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/302

 wanted to enable him to throw off his lethargy. The emaciated frame and the lustreless eyes must have taken sudden fire from the soul within, for we are told that he called his servants to his side, ordered them to raise him on his pillows, and then cried out with unexpected vigour, "I will not die but live, and I will show up the evil deeds of the friars!"

He did live, for more than five years thereafter, and both he and the Orders gave and received many hard knocks. His first and main quarrel was with the false teaching and usurped authority of Rome; but he could never come to terms with the religious professors who had forsaken the rule of poverty in order to live delicately, to exercise dominion, to amass wealth, and to keep for themselves what had been given to them in trust for the poor. This is the note which prevails throughout his writings in relation to the mendicant Orders, and which he enforces in a hundred different ways.

Much of what Wyclif wrote, especially in his longer and more argumentative works, is almost unreadable for men and women of the present day, and serviceable perhaps for nothing so much as the elucidation of his character and work. After the lapse of five complete centuries, in every year of which the effect of his stainless and courageous life has been continuously operative in the cause of religious freedom, what the world wants to see and feel is not so much the quality of his controversial logic, or the exact conclusiveness of his somewhat ponderous and involved arguments—for which at