Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/426

 movement so much of new energy and virility that the Reformation in England was virtually effected at the moment of his death, and there was nothing to come but the outward and political manifestations of its completeness. Lollardy, in fact, was Protestantism in all its essential features—predestinarianism, constructive pantheism, as its ecclesiastical censors are wont to complain,—but in any case the Protestantism which won for England the open Bible and the prayer-book, which overthrew the monasteries, the Orders, the Roman obedience, and the mass. It was not Cranmer, nor Cromwell, nor Henry VIII. and his two Protestant children, who banished papal authority from the Anglican Church. They were the accidents, or at most the instruments of a victory already accomplished. For the true moment of victory, and for the effective Reformer, we must look back to the fourteenth century.

The history of England between the reigns of Richard II. and Henry VIII. seems to be more fully dominated than historians have generally admitted by the great forces of religious, moral, and social upheaval which had come to maturity in the lifetime of Wyclif. The outcome of the religious upheaval was Lollardy. The effect of the moral upheaval was an earnest, evangelical spirit, a somewhat stern and harsh puritanism, a more pure and consequently more refined conduct on the part, especially, of the poorer clergy and their congregations. By the social upheaval there was created in England, between the Plantagenet and Tudor epochs, nothing less than the English people—a people emancipated, dignified by