Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/336

 from them. His complete version, as we know, occupied the last few years of his life, but we cannot say when the first manuscript of his first translation began to be copied out and distributed. It seems to be a reasonable belief that the earlier copies were made for his first missionary priests, and that these missionaries—volunteers, it may be, who asked nothing better than to put his precepts into practice—set out from Oxford, or Lutterworth, before anything like a systematic mission could be said to exist.

There is no ground to suppose that Wyclif intended or desired to create an Order, in any sense of the term. He had seen too much of the perversion of good intentions of that sort to allow him to entertain such a design. But unless the mission of the Priests had been in some measure systematic, it is unlikely that his contemporaries, friends and enemies alike, would have mentioned it as one of the salient facts of his career.

It is easy to believe that Oxford supplied Wyclif with many an enthusiast willing to don the sheep-skin and sandals, and to abandon all—ease and culture and genial companionship for his regimen of apostolic poverty. It is indeed impossible not to believe that such a cause, at such a moment, attracted scores of men in that home and nursery of fervent enthusiasms, which for seven hundred years has never failed to furnish either pioneers for a hazardous enterprise or leaders for a forlorn hope. But undoubtedly a certain number of the Poor Priests were humble and unlettered men, who had been