Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/443

 wide the pages which, in the awakened conscience of every independent Christian, were to replace the authority of fallible men.

In a word, Wyclif was no mere forerunner of the Protestant Reformation, but the Reformer in chief. In the intellectual domain, in the field of ideas and of spiritual activity, he originated the movement which had its issue in the sixteenth century, when the Tudor monarchs rode but did not raise the storm. For one reason or another Wyclif was long excluded from his proper place in history; but the nineteenth century, bringing together for the first time all the main contemporary documents, has been able to take the true bearings of the epoch of religious reform. And perhaps no one hereafter will attempt to explain the conduct of Henry VIII., of Thomas Cromwell, and the martyred bishops, without beginning his story from the last of the Schoolmen, and from the golden prime of the University of Oxford.