Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/306

 against which he most indignantly protested. His enemies did not fail to say that his rage against the monks and friars was not very pronounced until Archbishop Langham in 1366 had deprived him of the wardenship of Canterbury Hall, and put back the regulars in place of the seculars—events which, in all probability, had no reference at all to our John Wyclif. In any case the question would seem to be not so much when Wyclif's rage was hottest as whether he was hot with good reason.

Another accusation brought against him by the friars and their friends, after he was dead, represented him as having tried in vain to secure a nomination to the see of Worcester—the inference being that his attacks upon the wealthy clergy who mis-used their wealth, and upon the rapidly increasing endowments of the Church, grew out of this check to his worldly ambitions. No candid reader of the life and writings of Wyclif will give a second thought to these charges of hypocrisy and greed, stamped as they are by their patent absurdity.

To admit that the Reformer's hostility to the abuses of the monastic system, and his condemnation of a wealthy priesthood, were not openly displayed until he had felt the smart of personal disappointment would be to ignore the note of continuity which is manifest throughout his intellectual history. If there is any force at all in what has been said of Wyclif's mental and moral descent from the liberal Schoolmen, and especially from his immediate predecessor William of Ockham, it follows as a matter of course that he began his career