Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/335



To drawe folk to heven by fairnesse, By good ensample, was his busynesse. But it were eny person obstinat, What so he were of high or low estat, rtim wolde he snybbe sharply for the nones ... ... Christes lore, and his apostles' twelve, He taught, and ferst he folwed it himselve."

As to Wyclif's political sympathies with his poorest fellow-countrymen there is no question. He protests strongly in his later writings against abuses and oppressions to which Englishmen were exposed, such as the inequality of the law, the venality of the lawyers, the falsification of legal documents, the subornation of perjury, the perversion of justice, the manifold extortions and fraudulent enforcement of serfdom and labour. It has been urged that he was secured as a popular champion in 1381, and that his greater popularity from this time forward was due to a political (as well as a religious) new departure in the year just named. At any rate the actual revolt of the peasants may well have stimulated his political sympathies.

It is no more possible to fix a precise date for the first commissioning of Wyclif's Priests than it is to say when the earliest of his extant English sermons was preached, or when he began to translate the New Testament. It has already been said that the plan of some of his Sunday Gospel sermons is such as to suggest that they were mere skeletons prepared for the use of the disciples whom he sent forth to the byways of England, to win the souls of the poorest hinds, and to tear away the veil of ignorance or prejudice which had hitherto hidden the