Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/79

 Abelard, a stiff-necked scholar, puffed up with pride, teaching the new-fangled learning, distilling the poison of pro fane knowledge and unchastened reason, spreading around him the miasma of heresy and rebellion. Let them scent such a man, mark him, track him down, wrestle with him for his own soul and the souls of his unhappy victims—and then? Well, the English were an obstinate race. The civil authorities might give them no aid against the most pestilent of heretics; even the bishops might remain indifferent to their faithful expostulations. It was for his devoted Preachers to meet such difficulties with sublimer faith, with subtler intellect, with blades from the armoury of their enemy; and the time might yet come, even in rebellious England, when the stern but loving discipline of Holy Church might contribute to the greater glory of God by its autos-da-fé.

So may we imagine this seer and zealot of the still undivided Church to have commissioned his English delegates, as he placed in their hands a letter of recommendation from Blanche of Castile to Isabel de Balbec, the pious wife of Robert de Vere, who was to give them the nest-egg of their future possessions both at Oxford and at Cambridge.

At any rate this was the policy which the English Dominicans more or less consciously pursued. They bided their time, and whenever a chance presented itself they were ardent defenders of the Roman tradition and the papal authority. It does not appear that their morals were ever so far relaxed as those of the Franciscans; and intellectually they remained