Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/422

 furthest east of the empire. Waldensian congregations were to be found in Thuringia, the March of Brandenberg, Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Pomerania, Prussia, and Poland."

There is no inducement to deny that some of the ideas of Pierre de Vaud, like some of the ideas of Marsiglio and Ockham, were contributory to the body of independent thought into which Wyclif would be initiated at Oxford in his early manhood. We have seen that Archbishop Langham had thought it necessary to remonstrate with the holders of unsound doctrine at the University when Wyclif was not much over forty-five years of age, and that this doctrine was by no means on all points identical with the conclusions taught by Wyclif ten or twelve years later. How much (if anything) these earlier divagations owed to the Waldensians it is impossible to say, for the inquiry into their character has not been worked out with sufficient detail. If the censors who are bound to begin by regarding Wyclif as a heretic, instead of a restorer of truths which had previously been obscured, mean no more than that some things which he taught had been held on the Continent before he was born, we can readily agree with them.

The point is important, because there are some who have attempted to make Wyclif responsible for all the acts committed by Protestant combatants in the fifteenth century, with about as much reason as is displayed in the charge that he fomented the revolt of the peasants in England. The Czechs and the Germans must be held responsible for their own religious wars; and assuredly there is enough to