Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/440

 might be converted into an instrument of the most outrageous tyranny over the innermost thoughts and feelings. There we have another instance of what has so frequently been displayed in the history of mankind: spiritual authority, pushed to a logical extreme, pronounces its final edict in the sentence, "I kill you because I do not like you." It was the μὴ εἶναι of Aristotle, translated into an Athanasian curse.

Archbishop Chicheley has been roundly accused of instigating Henry V. to renew the war with France in order to relieve the strain at home, and to turn aside the danger with which the Church was menaced. Of course these were amongst the natural effects of the war, which produced another "scambling and unquiet time," and did much to postpone the religious and other evolutions in England, already more than due.

Though the evidence becomes fainter as we advance more than half a century beyond Wyclif's death, yet there is ample proof of both the religious and the political survival of Lollardy in England. It may be true that we do not hear much more of the term in the pages of the fifteenth-century chronicles; but, unfortunately, some of these chronicles are more distinguished for what they omit than for what they include. And, after all, if every scrap of direct evidence on the subject had been brought together, the fact would remain that we need no proof of this kind to assure us that the spirit and conviction of the Lollards, having once taken hold of so large a fraction of the nation, could not