Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/307

 as a clergyman with a profound belief in the doctrine of evangelical poverty, and did not wait until he was more than forty years old before he gave it public utterance. At any rate his tongue was specially unloosed against the friars after the death of Fitzralph in 1360; and though, like the Archbishop of Armagh, he had never held the extreme doctrine of evangelical poverty as it stood condemned in the decretals—based on the assertion that Christ himself had begged instead of working for his living—still his advance on Fitzralph's position was enough to prove that Wyclif was not fishing for preferment. To say, as his greatest enemies said, that he inherited the damnable doctrines of Marsiglio was to say that he was in sympathy with the Fraticelli and the Brotherhood of Munich, that he accepted from his boyhood the whole theory of a spiritual Church, free from worldly titles or claims, and that the logical indefensibility of Church endowments was one of the grounding principles of his belief.

If other reasons were needed to show how untenable is the notion that Wyclif began to condemn endowments in 1363 or 1368—the see of Worcester fell vacant at both these dates,—because he had angled for a bishopric without success, it might be enough to point out that his actions and utterances, so far as we are acquainted with them, were consistently of such a character as to militate against the chance of his receiving any sort of preferment in the Church; that his association with John of Gaunt, who had been credited with a desire to spoliate the Church, would have been the last thing to suggest