Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/36

 parade of virtue. For amongst my other faults which give me ground for alarm this is one of the greatest, that, by consuming the property of the poor in superfluous food and garments, I fail to afford a pattern to others, whereby the light and rule of a holy life such as I ought to lead might shine through my priestly guise in the sight of the congregation. Nay, I confess with pain that I eat frequently, greedily, and delicately, leading a social life; and if I were to try, like a hypocrite, to make false pretence in this regard, they who sit with me at table would bear witness against me."

Nothing was too bad for Wyclif's most spiteful enemies to say of him. They called him not merely a glutton when he ate and a hypocrite when he fasted, but a turncoat, a traitor, an instrument of the devil, a mirror of hypocrites, a fabricator of lies, John Wicked-believe, and Judas Scarioth. To level coarse insults at Wyclif must have seemed to any man of refinement an odious thing to do; for in his later days, and probably also in his youth, he was a man of feeble constitution. The insistence of his friends at the St. Paul's inquiry, nearly eight years before his death, that he should have the unusual indulgence of a seat during his examination, certainly suggests a knowledge on their part that he stood in need of such indulgence; and there is a similar suggestion in his anxiety at a much earlier age to find parochial duties as near as possible to Oxford and London. Often enough the determining cause which brought a young man to the university, and to the clerical profession, in times when there were very few