Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/305

 and vindictively hostile to the most uncompromising of their cen ors. His invective was certainly not of the mildest kind, and even his friends have occasionally lamented the stern and sweeping character of the charges which he brought against the regular and higher secular clergy. Wyclif himself would have admitted that there were priests, regulars, and perhaps even bishops who did not deserve to be branded as corrupt. A man of milder (perhaps less effective) temperament might have dwelt upon these exceptions, and have been more on his guard against the misconceptions which arose out of his too comprehensive reproaches. Possibly it never occurred to him to say anything so fatuous as that the censure of greed and hypocrisy must not be held to apply to such as are neither greedy nor hypocritical. The fourteenth century, it must be remembered, was not a time of mincing words, halting controversies, and compromises which sacrifice nine points of a just demand in order to secure the tenth. Wyclif was thoroughly a man of his century—a leader and a pioneer, it is true, but still a man of limited knowledge, only half liberated from the scholastic yoke, conventional in his dialectical methods, and one who was too much attached to logical precision—and perhaps to logical hyperbole—to think much of the weaker and illogical minds which would be disturbed by his confident conclusions.

It is natural that a secular clergyman holding such views as Wyclif held, and expressing them with increasing freedom during the last few years of his life, should have been charged with the very offences