Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/91



CHAPTER IV.

WYCLIF AND THE SCHOOLMEN.

E have already encountered, amongst the pioneers of religious reform in England, members of two mutually supporting bodies, advancing in parallel directions towards a common object. On the one hand we see the men of action, monarchs and statesmen, with their allies and instruments, who in the temporal domain successively resisted and attacked the assumptions of the Roman Church; and on the other hand there were the men of thought, of accurate logic and awakened conscience, who in the spiritual domain required that Christian practice should conform to the root-principles of Christianity, and refused to accept the papal superstructure as of equal authority with the foundation which it hid from sight. 59