Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/428

 common hostility to the Church, and a common resolve to substitute personal religion for its dogmatic and ecclesiastical system." The reaction of this spirit on the political movements of the day followed as a matter of course. "Nobles, like the Earl of Salisbury, and at a later time Sir John Oldcastle, placed themselves openly at the head of the cause, and threw open their gates as a refuge for its missionaries. London in its hatred of the clergy was fiercely Lollard. It was in vain that the clergy attempted to stifle the new movement by their old weapon of persecution. The jealousy entertained by the baronage and gentry of every pretension of the Church to secular power foiled its efforts to make persecution effective. Powerless as the efforts of the Church were for purposes of repression, they were effective in arousing the temper of the Lollards into a bitter and fanatical hatred of their persecutors. The Lollard teachers directed their fiercest invectives against the wealth and secularity of the great Churchmen. In a formal petition to Parliament they mingled denunciations of the riches of the clergy with an open profession of disbelief in transubstantiation, priesthood, pilgrimages, and image worship, and a demand, which illustrates the strange medley of opinions which jostled together in the new movement, that war might be declared un-christian."

How large a part Wyclif had borne in the assertion of this influence, political as well as religious, the reader of the preceding pages will be in a position to judge.