Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/424

 language of popes and cardinals, invariably preached the extermination of heretics on the ground that they undermined all authority, that they would rob not merely the Church but also the Kings and the nobles, that they encouraged the refusal of taxes and other dues to rulers who could not stand a test of morality, and that their doctrines would soon reduce the wealthy to beggary and the State to anarchy. If there had not been at the same time an internecine war of pope against pope, bishop against bishop, and priest against priest, this dead set against the heretics in every country would have been far more effectual. As it was, the rulers of the earth were filled with panic, and the persistence of the new ideas was maintained in spite of every effort to stamp them out.

Historians of the Roman Church have recognised the magnitude of the disaster which fell upon Christendom at the time of the Schism, though perhaps they have not always seen it in its true proportions. The demoralisation consequent on the "Babylonian Captivity," and on the return of Gregory to Rome, contributed not a little, as we have seen, to the immunity of Wyclif, and enabled him to put forth his plea for reform, from his vantage-ground of Oxford, with an authority and a deliberation which he could not otherwise have hoped for. If Rome had been free and unfettered, it is urged by her historians, she would have nipped such heresy as Wyclif's in the bud; the tide of "rationalism" might have been completely turned, and the unity of the Church might never have been broken. No doubt there would have been a notable difference in the