Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/78

 if it had been possible to imitate at Oxford and London what was done at Toulouse and Paris, under Louis the Saint and his mother Blanche of Castile, there were doubtless fanatics enough in England to be ready participants in the Dominican crusade. But it was not possible. Apart from the absolute bar which English independence of character would have offered to the creation of a new tribunal at the instance of a foreign potentate,—in spite of the fact that England was for her own purposes a tributary of Rome,—still the long succession of wars with France, the increasing jealousy of papal interference, and perhaps even the political sympathy evoked by the religious tyranny in Languedoc (our next neighbour in Gascony and Guienne) would have sufficed to prevent it.

We may assume that Dominic saw the impossibility as clearly as anyone. If he gave a special mandate to his English missionaries, as is likely enough, he would remind them that they were not to expect any help from the arm of the Inquisition, and that, for the present at least, no rack or funeral pyre could aid them in their quest of souls. He would bid them gain a footing amongst the clerks and students of the ancient universities, and direct their subtlety against the perilous inroads on the faith which had already been made by the Schoolmen. He would tell them to watch for the beginnings of relapse, to train themselves for the contest which was certain to be thrust upon them, and to keep the sword of their dialectic sharp and keen. They might find at Oxford or at Cambridge a new