Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/51

 a moulder of men and a shaper of history. Wyclif stood at the parting of the ways which led from the Middle Ages to the revival of learning and letters. He was himself the main connecting link between the intellectual hardihood of the Schoolmen and the definite revolt of the Teutonic world from Rome. Essentially throughout his life a secular English clergyman, still his early mental standpoint was on the continent of Europe rather than in England. Rome had so long been the metropolis of religion, as the French universities had been the capitals of scholastic theology and law, that many if not most of Wyclif's predecessors in the long struggle for the emancipation of human thought had lived and died on the continent. The time was at hand for the English Church and the English State to break away from their foreign trammels; but a series of mighty efforts was needed in both cases, and it was only with the eye of faith that Wyclif could see the chains of Romanism and feudalism finally snapped.

It must therefore greatly assist us to arrive at a fair understanding of the problems in which John Wyclif was concerned if we ask ourselves in the first place what was the condition of Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, what were the relations between the Papacy and the different European governments, and especially what effect our constant wars with France would naturally have upon our relations with the popes at Avignon. Narrowing the inquiry from this point, we may note the internal condition of England, having particular regard to the