Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/31

 chief notabilities of his time, and, though the friars were not slow in detecting and denouncing his unorthodox views, their own unpopularity must have made it more difficult for the hierarchy of the Church to take action than it would have been if the Orders had held their peace.

If John Wyclif had been a protestant, and a heresiarch, and nothing more, or if he had been known to us mainly by his controversies and his writings, we might have been content to regard him with a somewhat perfunctory interest as "the morning-star of the Reformation," or as a scholastic theologian who wrote voluminous treatises in dry mediæval Latin and decidedly uncouth English. Truth to tell, the works of Wyclif are not and cannot be made very attractive to men and women of the present day. Their importance in the history of religious belief is incalculable, and to the systematic student of that history they will always be indispensable. For the general reader they are, in their complete form, not only superfluous but even a little misleading. At all events they do not show us the true or the most lovable Wyclif, any more than Milton's controversies with Salmasius show us the author of 'Lycidas at his best. Happily there is enough in the personal history of Wyclif, as a man rather than as a writer, and as an evangelist rather than as a controversialist, to excite interest and affection in no ordinary degree, and to warrant us in treating him as one of England's worthies.

An unbroken chain of evidence, stretching across the five centuries which have passed since his death,