Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/421

 We have seen how it happened that the preachers and scholars of Bohemia learned and adopted the views of the English Reformer, and how the torch of free inquiry was passed over from the hands of Oxford to those of Prague. History is clear enough about the succession of ideas from Wyclif onward, but it would be difficult to show the descent of the scholastic and Wycliffite innovations from the Albigensian heresies, except on the principle of post hoc ergo propter hoc. If the conclusions of Wyclif involved all those of the Vaudois, why not also those of the Arian Visigoths, and all the errors which had at any time germinated in that hotbed of religious crudities, the land of Languedoc? If the facts of transference between England and the continent had been the converse of what we know them to have been, and if Wyclif had taken his ideas from Bohemia, instead of giving his ideas to Bohemia, there would have been more ground for this theory of Waldensian origin. Unquestionably the Waldensian ideas were not obliterated by the Inquisition of Dominic and the crusade of Innocent III., but spread themselves to the eastward in Bavaria and Austria, and were found re-asserting themselves with inextinguishable energy throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Prof. Pastor himself, referring to the disastrous time of the great Schism, says: "It was not only in Southern Germany and the Rhine country, the two centres of Mediaeval heresy, that a great proportion of the population had embraced the Waldensian doctrine; it had also made its way into the north and the