Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/67

 with a French majority in the College of Cardinals, abode under the shelter of the kings of France. Rome herself, meanwhile, was successively courted and almost won by Ludwig of Bavaria and the tribune Rienzi; and throughout western Christendom the minds of the faithful were profoundly disturbed, not to say unstrung, by what seemed to be the irreparable ruin of the Vicars of Christ.

Such was the condition of Europe and of the Papacy when John Wyclif was born; and Wyclif himself, in the ripeness of life and the fulness of activity, was to witness the great Schism of 1378, by which the diminished authority of Rome was to be still further impaired and depreciated.

He might have repeated to himself in his old age, with pardonable exultation, that eloquent sentence of the historian of ancient and secular Rome: "Habent imperia suos terminos; huc cum venerint, sistunt, retrocedunt, ruunt."