Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/320

 sacredness of this accident that they hold every other form of mass unworthy of being listened to, and pretend that all who dissent from their falsehoods are ignoramuses, I suppose, from some university in the realms of darkness. But I believe that the truth will finally bring them into subjection."

There seem to have been many rejoinders to this Confession. John Tyssyngton, a friar of the Order of Franciscans, wrote a terribly long-winded treatise in order to confute Wyclif's views on the sacrament, which Netter has preserved amongst the "wheat" of his promiscuous gleaning (in the Fasciculi Zizaniorum cum Tritico); and an Augustinian friar, Thomas Wynterton, wrote still more at length in his tract Absolutio. Berton and Sutbraye, too the latter a monk of St. Alban's, and both of them members of the Synod which met at the Blackfriars priory in the following year—took up their pens against the irrepressible heretic; and a certain "Dunelmenensis" followed suit. It is clear that the persistent courage of Wyclif, which inspired him to stronger utterance after each successive attempt to crush him, gave abundant provocation and stimulus to the zealous orthodoxy of his contemporaries amongst the regular and secular clergy.

According to Henry of Knyghton, canon of Leicester, who wrote and died in the reign of Richard II., and was therefore a contemporary of Wyclif, as well as a near neighbour, the Rector of Lutterworth made his peace with the Church on this occasion, in order to avoid death, and "abandoned his defence not of divine wisdom but of his hollow