Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/39

 for an intellectual mind, was his lack of the robust health and decided taste which were necessary to one who aimed at becoming either a soldier or a merchant, or even a manager of the family estate. Wyclif was the son of a gentleman of good means. He probably owned or had a claim upon the advowson of the rectory of Wycliffe. But if weakness led him to adopt the life of a clergyman, ambition constrained him to follow an active and public career. The known facts of his life chime in with the hypothesis that he was always a man of indifferent health; and yet the fiery soul sustained him in many a hard battle with friars and monks, with the English hierarchy and the papal court. If we were to judge from his fighting attitude alone, it would be difficult to consider him as anything else than a vigorous, hardy, and indefatigable man.

When Wyclif's bones were torn from their grave in Lutterworth churchyard, by an English bishop at the command of a Roman pope, when they were consumed to ashes and thrown into the Swift, thence to be borne, as Fuller said, from brook to river, and from river to ocean, until the seeds of his doctrine had sprung up in every land, Rome was but giving effect to a logically necessary conclusion. The position which Wyclif had taken up against the later teaching of the canons, was absolutely uncompromising. "From the eleventh century," he practically said, "the dogma of the Church has been perverted. The popes have been wrong, the councils have been wrong, the decretals are full of heresy. If Rome will not unsay her false doctrine, the