Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/431

 to his death was so praiseworthy and honest in the University that he never gave any offence, nor was he aspersed with any mark of infamy or sinister suspicion; but in answering, reading, preaching, and determining, he behaved himself laudably, as a valiant champion of the truth, and catholicly vanquished by sentences of Holy Scripture all such as by their wilful beggary blasphemed the religion of Christ. This doctor was not convicted of heretical pravity, or by our prelates delivered to be burned after his burial. For God forbid that our prelates should have condemned a man of so great probity for a heretic, who had not his equal in all the University, in his writings of logic, philosophy, divinity, morality, and the speculative sciences."

Certainly there is more evidence of courage in this letter than is apparent in the attitude of some of the Wycliffites in 1382 and the following years. Not long afterwards, in 1407, Arundel held a Provincial Synod at Oxford, having possibly found a more amenable Chancellor—for the dispute concerning his right of visitation was not yet adjusted. It was ordered on the authority of the Church that no works of Wyclif should be used in the universities, and that all works written in Wyclif's lifetime should pass under the censorship of the universities and the Archbishop before they were used in the schools. Apparently Oxford faced the Primate without flinching, until the accession of Pope John XXIII. in 1410. John sent Arundel a bull reversing that of Boniface in the matter of visitations; and it was about the