Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/303

 best we are dependent on manifestly corrupt texts,—as the moral lineaments and effective force of the man himself. We want to know and be familiar with the John Wyclif who, in the days of our childhood was little more to any of us than the shadow of a great name: the John Wyclif who was Chaucer's contemporary under the Plantagenet kings; who in the Middle Ages of history moved as a star across the dark firmament of western Europe; a Schoolman, and yet a teacher of the most accepted Christianity of to-day. We want to feel sure, and we are only just beginning to feel it, that the man to whom every lover of truth is so largely indebted stands before us as a recognised presence and identity, in his form and substance as he lived; the brilliant Oxford man who paced the pavements of the schools, or haunted the streets and meadows between his college and the silver streams, passing the very spot where, two centuries later, bishops such as his soul would have loved were to light a candle for the faith as he believed it; the eager, busy optimist who threw himself into the eddies of English politics, hoping against hope that the secular arm would strike effectively where he saw such urgent need; the pale, weak priest, with firm-set lips and undaunted eyes, to whom the re-discovered truth was a mastering reality, far above the authority of Rome or the claims of tradition.

To read the controversial works of Wyclif without some such intimate and sympathetic realisation of his character is to make no near approach to a knowledge of the man, and very little towards the