Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/40

 national Churches must repudiate her claim to lead them. She has built up a crazy superstructure on the true foundation; we must sweep it away, and get back to the life and words of Christ." To Rome, that meant death, and for the Roman Curia it was a simple act of self-preservation to crush Wyclif beneath its censures, and to do all that was possible to bury his record in obscurity. The necessary steps were interrupted by the Schism; thirty years had passed since the death of Wyclif when the Councils of Rome and Constance took the completion of the work in hand. It was then too late. The writings of the famous Doctor had passed into the keeping of the English and Bohemian universities. The scholars of that day either concealed them or refused to give them to the flames. The doctrines of Wyclif had spread throughout England, Germany, and Austria, and neither the terrors of the Inquisition nor the agonies of a thousand martyrdoms could expel them again.

Nevertheless Wyclif and Wyclifrism have been under the ban of Rome from that day to this. No doubt there must have been a few in every generation, ecclesiastics and scholars for the most part, who would be acquainted with the manuscripts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with the main facts of Wyclif's life and work, with the contemporary testimony of his friends and enemies, and with, at any rate, some of his writings. Thomas Netter, who was born before Wyclif died, made a collection of papers relating to the controversies and condemnations of the heretical Doctor, under the title