Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/390

 that privat reule or neue religion founded of sinful men, and stably holde the reule of Jesus Crist." The second demand is that all who have denied the power of the King to deal with the temporalities of the Church should be condemned. The third is that tithes and offerings should be taken away or withheld from clergy of immoral life.

"Ah, Lord God," Wyclif writes on this point, "is it reason to constrain the poor people to provide a worldly priest, however unworthy of life and of knowledge, in pomp and pride, covetise and envy, gluttony and drunkenness and lechery, in simony and heresy, with fat horse and jolly and gay saddles, and bridles ringing by the roadside, and himself with costly clothes and pelure, and to suffer their wives and children, and their poor neighbours, to perish for hunger, thirst, cold, and other mischiefs of the world? Ah, Lord Jesus Christ! since within few years men paid their tithes and offerings at their own will free, to good men and able, for the worship of God and the profit of Holy Church fighting on earth, must a worldly priest destroy this holy and approved custom, constraining men to abandon this freedom, and turning tithes and offerings into wicked uses!"

The fourth point in the petition—and it was probably for this in chief that Wyclif wrote and presented—it raises the special question of the sacrament, on which the Reformer had but recently declared himself, and which his enemies had magnified into the rankest and most unforgiveable of all his heresies. Let us return once more to Wyclif's