Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/322

 have been wont to quarrel with and burn each other as on their interpretations of the symbols, or rather on the words in which they have attempted to express their interpretations. Mr. T. Arnold has hazarded a suggestion that Knyghton and his friends, in their zeal for orthodoxy, may have put this short English statement into circulation as though it were the substance of the Confession, or the actual Confession, made by Wyclif at Oxford. One would imagine that if his enemies could have brought themselves to such a point of dishonesty they would have taken care to make a better bargain with their consciences.

There are other possible explanations. If the "I knowleche" paper is a genuine production of Wyclif's, and if it was at any time written or accepted as a confession, in order to protect the writer from an unpleasant alternative, the immunity was certainly purchased cheap. But it might have been so. There would have been nothing dishonourable in Wyclif's saying, "If this paper will satisfy you, without elaboration and comment, I am willing to sign it, for it expresses my honest belief." And there would be nothing very extraordinary in Courtenay's accepting it on those terms, for it may have saved him at some particular moment an infinity of trouble, and still have given him the appearance of a triumph, which he could trust the friars to make the most of throughout the country.

This hypothesis, indeed, is scarcely more satisfactory than the other. The last thing which Wyclif would be likely to do of his own free will would be