Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/95

 writers number the scholars of Oxford, Paris, and Bologna by tens of thousands. Close in their wake came the foundations of Padua, Naples, Toulouse, Montpelier, Cambridge, Salamanca, and Prague.

In this fertile soil were sown the seeds of independence, inquiry, and moral courage. Here learning grew, and the revolt against the suppression of truth was prepared. The path which Wyclif was to tread had been worn by Abelard of Paris and his pupil Arnold of Brescia, by John of Salisbury, Pierre Dubois, and Berengar; by Bishop Grosteste, Bracton, Archbishop Bradwardine, and Ockham of Oxford; by Marsiglio of Padua and Paris, Fitzralph of Oxford, Lupoid of Bebenburg, and many others who owed their training and hardihood to the schools.

Each particular age has its available and appropriate refuges for the thought of man, in its reaction and revolt against spiritual tyranny; yet, age for age, the refuge is substantially the same in each. The human mind which refuses to dwell with the moles and bats must grope and struggle for the light by such avenues as may be open to it. Before the period of the general Renascence of liberal studies there were few avenues, and those narrow and difficult, which led to any sort of illumination save that which shone from the chair of St. Peter. The seven sciences supposed to be included in the trivium and quadriviiim—a fifth-or sixth-century classification—were little better than titles for the students in the ecclesiastical schools. Ingulfus, Abbot of Croyland in the eleventh century, a Westminster and