Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/304

 comprehension of his life-work. To the merely critical mind, for instance, which is governed by our actual canons of literary taste and amenity, and forgets to transpose the language of the fourteenth century into the same key with that of the nineteenth, the tone occasionally adopted by Wyclif in his later years against the Papacy and the religious Orders may well seem to pass the bounds of moderation.

One or two quotations have already been given from the sermons of Wyclif in which the unworthiness of Christian professors was severely castigated. Other discourses will be found in the same collection which were written after the Schism, in some of which the writer declares his belief that the friars are mainly actuated by greed, and that they would easily change from Urban to Clement if such a course were likely to be more profitable. In another sermon he charges them with obstructing the Poor Priests, who interfered with their gains. In the Vae Octuplex, which is found in all the best manuscripts of Wyclif's sermons, and has always been attributed to him, the eight woes pronounced against the Scribes and Pharisees are brought home to the Church of the second millennium, and especially to the friars. This indeed is Wyclif's prevailing note in all his denunciations—that the errors of the Church have invaded her only "since the fiend was loosed."

Under the lash of such a tongue, no wonder if the friars, the monks and the wealthier clergy had become at first restive, then indignant, then bitterly