Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/396

 sacrament, the four or five years following his first illness, found him constantly engaged in what turned out to be the main and most durable occupations of his life.

Meanwhile he was compelled to leave Oxford, and his brilliant university career of nearly half a century was brought to an end. He ceased to reside, probably ceased even to visit, ceased to lecture and determine, and contented himself with a quiet existence in his Lutterworth rectory. Courtenay's powers were sufficiently extensive to impose this retirement upon Wyclif, even if he had been unwilling to give up his Oxford work; and the Primate was not likely to be satisfied with anything less. Moreover, some of the men on whom the discipline of the Church had fallen were no longer able to stand by Wyclif 's side; and, though there was still plenty of fight left in him, he would have found his position in the University untenable if he had persisted in defying the Primate. With a hostile Chancellor, with Rygge almost despairing of the cause, with Hereford, Aston, Repyngdon, and Bedenham either excommunicated, or submissive, or sedulously keeping out of the way, and with regulars and seculars combining against him, there was nothing for it but to bid farewell to the home in which his heart had become familiar, and to the focus of light and zeal which his own hand had done so much to maintain.

Oxford could ill afford to lose him. The last of the Schoolmen was gone, the dignity of the old scholastic learning had suffered a rude reverse, and the first sparks of the new enlightenment might seem to