Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/619

 THE PAPACY AND ITS OPPONENTS 563 plains that money " bestows bishoprics on men who are base," and permits priests "to have concubines all their lives," and that "popes and patrons refuse poor gentle blood and take Simon's son to keep sanctuary." The sin of Sloth is personified as a clergyman and confesses : — "I have been priest and parson passing thirty winters; Yet I can neither tell the notes, Nor sing, nor read a saint's life. But I can find in a field and in a furlong a hare, And hold a knight's court, and account with the reeve; But I cannot construe Cato, nor speak clerically." Such was the feeling in England when John Wyclif late in life began his work as a popular preacher and religious reformer. Previously he had been a professor at John Oxford and had written works of the scholastic w y cllf type in Latin. His scholastic theories of divine and civil lordship had, however, an important bearing upon his atti- tude to the problem of Church and State and led him to question the doctrine of papal supremacy. Wyclif found for a time a powerful patron in John of Gaunt, fourth son of Edward III, and supported the Parliaments toward the close of that king's reign in their hostile attitude toward the pope's temporal and financial claims. Like the author of Piers the Ploughman, Wyclif criticized the pilgrimages, indulgences, and worship of relics of his time, the mendicant orders, and the lives of other clergy. He believed that it would be bet- ter for the Church to lose its vast lands and wealth and be reduced to apostolic poverty. He also believed that the peo- ple lacked religious instruction. He preached to them and wrote tracts for them in their own tongue, founded an or- ganization of "poor priests" to do the same, and had the Bible translated into English. Thus he is one of the founders of English prose. Wyclif was a forerunner of the later Protestants in making the Bible the sole standard of religious belief and practice, and in rejecting such customs and doctrines of a forerunner the medieval Church as he felt could not be of Protes- justified by Scripture ; for instance, auricular con- fession, celibacy of the clergy, masses for the dead, and the