Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/392

 adds a document which he seems to regard as a withdrawal or submission on the part of the delinquent. It is clearly nothing of the kind. Wyclif merely repeats the general admission which he had made several times already concerning the spiritual identity of the consecrated host with the body of Christ; and he ends substantially as follows:

"You must admit how great a difference there is between us who believe that this sacrament is actual and natural bread, and the heretics who tell us that it is an accident without a subject. For before the enemy and father of lies was loosed (in the first thousand years of Christendom), this 'gabbing' was never devised. And how great a difference there is between us who believe that this sacrament is true bread in its kind, but sacramentally God's body, and the heretics who believe and tell us that this sacrament can in no way be God's body. For I am bold to say that, if this were truth, Christ and his saints were heretics, and the greater part of holy church at this moment believes in heresy. And herefor devout men suppose that this Council of Friars at London was with earth-din. For they put a heresy on Christ and the saints in heaven: wherefore the earth trembled, failing man's voice to answer for God, as it did in time of his passion, when he was condemned to bodily death.

"Christ and his mother (who destroyed all heresies in the ground) keep his Church in the true faith of this sacrament, and lead the King and his Government to require of her clerks and all her possessioners, under penalty of losing their temporalities,