Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/59

 It is true that the movement in England, which Wyclif inspired and led, came nearer to success than has sometimes been supposed. The suppression of monasteries actually began in the generation after his death. Parliament had declared boldly against the Pope; and if the Commons had been made of sterner stuff—if they had realised their strength, and had not been driven into panic by the revolt of the peasants, they might, even in the fourteenth century, have moulded the national Church on the nation's will. There was indeed no discontinuity in the protest which our ancestors raised against the innovations of Rome. Wyclif drew a line at the close of the first Christian millennium, and declared that after the thousandth year of Christ Satan was loosed, and Antichrist was enthroned in the pontifical chair. At any rate from the eleventh century there was never a time in England when the spiritual and temporal pretensions of the Popes were not categorically opposed. The Schoolmen headed the protest on the intellectual side. Lanfranc complained of Berengar that he wished to ignore the sacred sanctions, and to have recourse to mere logic and argument. This was the point at which Scholasticism had its origin; the protest of the Schoolmen was against the intolerable claim of Rome that her traditional sanctions and authorities should impose a limit upon intellect, morals, and individual conscience.

And if the popular mind, and the minds of a few scholars and preachers here and there, were outraged and alienated by the spiritual usurpations of the Papacy, its temporal and political assumptions were