Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/407

 confirmation of all that he had said about the corruptions of the Roman pontiffs in the second millennium. The majority of the friars, also, were enthusiastic about the crusade, and this was a fact which certainly would not tend to qualify the indignation of the old Reformer whom they had so persistently and successfully attacked. The tract on the Schism is largely occupied with a reasoned condemnation of the offer of indulgences for the special purpose and advantage of Pope Urban; and possibly this very tract provided Martin Luther, more than a century later, with some of his arguments against the huckstering of pardons in his own day.

In The Church and Her Members, Wyclif devotes one or two chapters to the misdeeds of the friars, and to the special injuries which they had brought upon the Church of Christ. "They despoil the people in many ways by hypocrisies and other falsehoods, and with the spoils they build Caym's castles, to the damage of the countries where they build them. They steal poor men's children, which is worse than stealing an ox; and they are particularly glad to steal heirs (I say nothing of the stealing of women) . . . They stir up nations to war, and peaceable men to lawsuits; they cause many divorces and many marriages without love, by the falsehoods which they tell, and by privileges of the court. I will not speak of the fighting that they do in one land or another, and of other bodily harms which