Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/425

 Christian world if Pope Boniface had never given himself away in his quarrel with Philip of France; if the captive popes at Avignon had had the courage to confine themselves to the spiritual sphere, and to abandon their secular ambitions; if Gregory had not hurried back to the seething intrigues of Rome, against the judgment of his cardinals, and under the patronage of the well-meaning but irresponsible nun, Catherine of Siena. The unity of the Church might indeed have been preserved; and if we could suppose it probable, or even possible, that this might have been done by a spontaneous reform of abuses from within—by the expulsion of strained dogma and depraved morals without forcing saintly men like John Wyclif into the position of heretics—it is manifest how great a disaster the acknowledged guardians of the Church would have avoided.

In any exhaustive history of the English people and the Anglican Church in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it would be necessary to bring to the front every incident and detail bearing upon the relations of the Church and the people, to study every indication of popular enthusiasm or prelatical tyranny, and to develop anew every fading feature of a deeply interesting picture. The work would be well worth doing, and to do it thoroughly would compensate the labour of a lifetime. Here it is not possible to go beyond some further suggestion of the magnitude, importance, and permanence of Wyclif's achievement. He had not only embodied and vocalised the aspirations for reform which he found at Oxford in his early days: he had infused into the