wycliffe

WYCLIFFE

Of Wycliffe, ‘the morning star of the Reformation,’ very little is with certainty known beyond what is gathered from his writings; hence he has been compared to ‘the voice of one crying in the wilderness ‘—a voice and nothing more—a mighty agency manifest only in its effects. A portrait of the reformer is preserved at Lutterworth, but it can scarcely be of the age assumed; it is probably the copy of a contemporary picture. At any rate, it fulfils our ideal of Wycliffe. We behold, in what was said to be his ‘spare, frail, emaciated frame,’ the countenance of a Yorkshireman, firm and nervous; of one who could form his own opinion and hold it against the world, and all the more resolutely because against the world.

The year of Wycliffe’s birth is usually stated as 1324, three years before the accession of Edward III. His name he took from his native village, situated about six miles from Richmond in York-shire, and thus it is sometimes written John de Wycliffe. In his time there were in truth but two professions—arms and the church; most lawyers, physicians, and even statesmen, were ecclesiastics. The universities were therefore thronged with crowds of students, ‘perhaps as numerous (if medieval statistics are to be credited) as the entire populations of Oxford and Cambridge at this day. Wycliffe was sent to Oxford, where, in course of time, he rose to high distinction as a lecturer, became a consummate master in dialectics, and the pride of the university. ‘He was second to none in philosophy,’ writes Knighton, a monk, who abhorred him;’ and in the discipline of the schools he was incomparable.’ He was promoted to various dignities —to the wardership of Baliol and Canterbury Halls, to the living of Fillingham, and finally to that of Lutterworth in Leicestershire, with which his name is most intimately associated, as where he dwelt longest, and where he died.

Wycliffe first rose into national publicity by his bold denunciations of the mendicant friars, who were swarming over the land, and interfering with the duties of the settled priesthood. In this contest he carried with him the sympathy, not only of the laity, but of the clergy, who saw in the friars troublesome interlopers. He treated all the orders with asperity. He branded the higher as hypocrites, who, professing beggary, had stately houses, rode on noble horses, and had all the pride and luxury of wealth, with the ostentation of poverty. The humbler, he rated with indignation as common able-bodied vagabonds, whom it was a sin to permit to saunter about, and fatten on the thrift of the pious.

Edward III, in 1366, called on Wycliffe for his advice as to his relation to the pope. Urban V had demanded payment of the tribute due under the convention of King John, and which had fallen thirty-three years into arrear. With many subtle and elaborate arguments, Wycliffe counseled resistance of the claim. He was still further honored by his appointment, in 1374, as a member of a deputation sent by Edward to Gregory XI to treat as to the adjustment of differences between English and ecclesiastical law. It is supposed that the experience gained in this journey sharpened and intensified Wycliffe’s aversion to the papacy, for on his return he began to speak of the pope as Antichrist, the proud worldly priest of Rome, and the most cursed of clippers and cut-purses. This daring language soon brought him into conflict with the authorities, and in 1377 he was cited to appear at St. Paul’s, to answer the charge of holding and publishing certain heretical doctrines. Wycliffe presented himself on the appointed day, accompanied by his friend John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster; but an altercation arising between Gaunt and Courtney, the bishop of London, the crowd broke into a tumult, and the court separated without doing anything. Other attempts were made to bring him to judgment, but with no decisive results. His teaching was condemned by convocation; Richard II, by letter, commanded his silence at Oxford, but at Lutterworth he wrote and preached with undaunted spirit. He owed something of this impunity to the great schism which had broken out in 1378 in consequence of the election of two popes, by which for several years the papal power was paralysed. Wycliffe seized the occasion for writing a tract, in which he called upon the kings of Christendom to use the opportunity for pulling down the whole fabric of the Romish dominion, ‘seeing that Christ had cloven the head of Antichrist, and made the two parts fight against each other.’ The favour of John of Gaunt was likewise a strong defense, but it is doubtful whether he would have cared to stand between Wycliffe and the terrible penalty of proven heresy. Gaunt was no theologian; he rejoiced in humbling the clergy, but he skewed no desire to tamper with the faith of the people.

Wycliffe’s opinions are difficult to define, first, because they were progressive, changing and advancing with experience and meditation; and second; became the authorship of many manuscripts ascribed to him is doubtful. He commenced by questioning the polity of Roman Catholicism, and ended in asserting its theology to be erroneous. In doctrine, Calvin might have claimed Wycliffe as a brother, but far beyond Calvin he was ready to accord perfect freedom of conscience. ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘wished his law to be observed willingly, freely, that in such obedience men might find happiness. Hence he appointed no civil punishment to be inflicted on the transgressors of his commandments, but left the persons neglecting them to the suffering which shall come after the day of doom.’

In the matter of church-government, he advocated principles which would almost identify him with the Independents. The whole framework of the hierarchy he pronounced a device of priestly ambition—the first step in the ascending scale, the distinction between bishop and presbyter being an innovation on the practice of the primitive church, in which all were equal. He was opposed to establishments and endowments, insisting that pastors should depend on the free offerings of their flocks. As a missionary, he was the director of a number of zealous men, styled ‘poor priests,’ who received and busily diffused his doctrines. ‘Go and preach,’ he said to them; ‘it is the sublimest work: but imitate not the priests, whom we see after the sermon sitting in the ale-houses, or at the gaming table, or wasting their time in hunting. After your sermon is ended, do you visit the sick, the aged, the poor, the blind, and the lame, and succour them according to your ability.’

His industry was astonishing. The number of his books, mostly brief tracts, baffles calculation. Two hundred are said to have been burned in Bohemia. His great work was the translation of the Scriptures from the Vulgate into English. Of this undertaking, Lingard says: ’ Wycliffe multiplied copies with the aid of transcribers, and his poor priests recommended it to the perusal of their hearers. In their hands it became an engine of wonderful power. Men were flattered with the appeal to their private judgment; the new doctrines insensibly acquired partisans and protectors in the higher classes.’ Wycliffe’s translation did much to give form and permanence to the English language, and it will for ever remain a mighty landmark in its history.

Dean Milman thus pithily sums up Wycliffe’s merits as an author: ‘He was a subtle schoolman, and a popular pamphleteer. He addressed the students of the university in the language and logic of the schools; he addressed the vulgar, which included no doubt the whole laity and the vast number of the parochial clergy, in the simplest and most homely vernacular phrase. Hence he is, as it were, two writers: his Latin is dry, argumentative, syllogistic, abstruse, obscure; his English rude, coarse, but clear, emphatic, brief; vehement, with short stinging sentences and perpetual hard antithesis.’

In 1379, Wycliffe was attacked with an illness which his physicians asserted would prove fatal. A deputation of friars waited on him to extort a recantation, but the lion sat up in bed and sternly dismissed them, saying: ‘I shall not die, but recover, and live to expose your evil deeds;’ and he did live until 1384. On the 29th of December of that year, he was in his church hearing mass when, just as the host was about to be elevated, he was struck down with palsy. He never spoke more, and died on the last day of the year, aged about sixty.

Wycliffe’s influence appeared to die with him; more than a century elapsed between his death and the birth of Latimer; yet his memory, his manuscripts, and above all his version of the Scriptures, gave life to the Lollards, whom no persecution could extirpate, and whose faith at last triumphed in the supremacy of Protestantism. In 1415, the Council of Constance, which consigned John Huss and Jerome of Prague to the flames, condemned forty-five articles, said to be extracted from the works of Wycliffe, as erroneous and heretical. Wycliffe they designated an obstinate heretic, and ordered that his bones, if they could be distinguished from those of the faithful, should be dug up and cast on a dunghill. Thirteen years later, this sentence was executed by the bishop of Lincoln, at the command of the pope. The Reformer’s bones were disinterred and burned, and the ashes cast into the Swift, whence, says Fuller, ‘they were conveyed to the Avon, by the Avon to the Severn, by the Severn to the narrow seas, and thence to the main ocean. Thus the ashes of Wycliffe are the emblem of his doctrine, which is now dispersed all the world over.’