Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/334

 he trained to preach and to translate the Bible, as well as to explain and illustrate it by precept and example.

Chaucer's picture of the secular priest may well have been thought of and mentioned in connection with Wyclif; and as we are trying to realise what he must have been to his poorest neighbours, and what his Poor Priests must have been to the serfs through his influence, it cannot be idle to recall the picture here. Might it not be reasonable to suppose that the old Rector of Lutterworth, but recently dead when the Canterbury Tales were completed, had unwittingly sat for the portrait of the "good man of religion"? We may recognise here the moral lineaments of Wyclif's character—apart from his controversies and logomachies—at least as confidently as we can see the actual features of his face in the Denbigh portrait.

"A good man was ther of religioun, And was a pore Persoun of a toun; But riche he was of holy thought and werk. He was also a lerned man, a clerk, That Christes gospel truly wolde preche; His parischens devoutly wolde he teche ... But rather wolde he geven out of dowte Unto his pore parischens aboute, Of his offrynge, and eek of his substance. He cowde in litel thing han suffisance ... This noble ensample unto his scheep he gaf, That ferst he wrought, and after that he taught. Out of the gospel he the wordes caught, And this figure he added yet therto— That if gold rust, what shulde yron do? For if a Prest be foul, on whom we trust, No wonder is a lewed man to rust ...