assent of their temporal rulers; and denied altogether his right to lay down or to expound rules of faith, appealing to the Scriptures as the only canon of orthodoxy to all Christian men.

These opinions, alike remarkable for their novelty and their boldness, were promulgated both by his own preaching and by that of his "poor priests," as they were called, converts attached to him, and who carried them all over the country, supplying, by their unwearied zeal in teaching, the want of that great instrument, the happy invention of a later period, for the rapid and universal instruction of the world.

It is not easy to conceive the impression produced by the New Doctrines, recommended, as they were, not more by the station and the character of their author than by the force with which they appealed to the feelings, the reason, and the interests of mankind. The load seemed to be removed under which the human mind had for so many ages lain prostrate. No longer compressed, it again manifested the elasticity which had never been destroyed, and, making a vigorous effort for entire relief, sprang forward to shake off the whole of its burthen. The gross and manifest absurdity of some received dogmas thus attacked by Wycliffe; the revolting injustice of others; the grievous oppression wrought by their application; the misconduct to which they so easily lent themselves; the abuses which they manifestly engendered, so revolting to all the strongest feelings of our nature-were quite sufficient to gain a favour

able reception for the tenets of the Reformers, even without the inducements which they so largely held out, by appealing to the worldly interests, and, generally, to the secular views of men.

Nor did Wycliffe and his disciples, the "poor priests," neglect the means best suited to win the confidence and command the respect of the people. They affected the most primitive simplicity of manners; they appeared only in coarse raiment of a russet hue, usually going about barefooted; they fed on the most frugal and homely fare; they partook of no popular amusements, nor assisted at any of the sports and revels in which the vulgar of the times so greatly delighted. Yet their demeanour was not harsh or repulsive-it was not even severe; their speech was rather winning and bland; and it was observed that they all used the same cast of language, expounding or declaiming in one common style. Though they held that marriage was not merely permitted to the ministers of the Gospel, but enjoined to the same extent in their case as in that of all others, yet they abstained from it when the indulgence seemed likely to interfere with their sacred functions. They diligently traversed the country in all directions, exhorting and teaching in private, comforting the sick, sustaining the dying, inveighing with an unprecedented boldness against the corruptions of the church, as well as the vices of her clergy; above all, instant in season and out of season in zealously preaching the word, and openly expounding

the Scriptures. Far the greatest of all the holds that Wycliffe had upon the people was obtained by his unlocking to mankind the sacred volume which the decrees of the Romish clergy had shut up from them. He himself translated into the vulgar tongue the whole of the Bible, only detached portions of which had before been given in English; he caused copies of his version to be multiplied; and the duty of constant preaching, whether for inculcating religious truth or for opening the Scriptures to the congregation, was the clerical function which he most peremptorily enjoined. The churchmen, aware betimes what a mighty influence this bestowed, and how dangerous to their power such instruction must prove, launched out as much against the translation and explanation of the Bible as against any part of his proceedings. "The Gospels (says the Canon of Leicester') which Christ gave the clergy, that they might dole out portions according to the wants of the lay folk, Wycliffe rendered from the Latin into the Anglican, not the angelic tongue; making every layman, and even woman that could read, more knowing than educated clerks themselves; thus casting the evangelical pearl before swine, and turning the gem of the priest into a sport for the people."

With the means so judiciously employed by the great reformer to propagate his doctrines, and the merits of the doctrines themselves, there conspired very powerfully the circumstances of society at the 'H. Knighton, 2644.

time when he began his ministry. The thick darkness which overspread Europe for several centuries, and was most impenetrable about the middle of the eleventh, had been gradually dispersing in England ever since the time of the Norman conquest; and during the fourteenth century there was a sensible progress made towards a state of greater refinement. Not only more learned and more inquiring men filled the higher places in society, some of whom indeed rank among the English classics of the present day,' but the middle orders of the people began to be somewhat better informed. The discipline of the feudal system had been materially relaxed; there had grown up the important class of traders; and the inhabitants of the towns had become a considerable body in the community. Even the labourers, the bulk of whom were still in a state of servitude or villenage, partook in some degree of the general movement by which the frame of society was advancing to improvement, and complaints were occasionally heard of the lord's conduct and the vassal's sufferings, to the extent of even questioning the right by which the one was held in a sort of property by the other. There is no better test of the progress which a people are making at any given time than the improvement of their jurisprudence; and Sir M. Hale, writing late in the seventeenth century, declares that, from the legal reforms of Edward the First,

Langley lived early in the fourteenth century, the author of "Piers Plowman's Vision." Gower and Chaucer, even Ocleve and Lydgate, to say nothing of Ockham or Scotus, were all contemporaries or immediate predecessors of Wycliffe.

who is often called the English Justinian, down to his own day, our law had received but little amendment though four hundred years had elapsed. But, above all, the hold so long maintained over men's minds by the church of Rome had been loosened. The disputes between the Pope and the Kings of England on the claims of the Holy See both to contribution and to clerical patronage, had been of long continuance. Edward the Third had carried on against it a contest in some degree successful upon those points. Severe laws had been passed to prevent any interference with the right of presentation to livings, and put down the practice of appealing to Rome; the papal usurpations were become a standing topic of popular invective and even of poetical derision; and, as the greater number of the clergy naturally sided with the Holy See in those disputations, one inevitable consequence of the controversies which marked the age was, to lessen the confidence of the people in their spiritual guides.

3

Making his appearance in such a condition of scciety, and addressing a people in these circumstances, Wycliffe must be allowed to have had important helps in recommending his doctrines, though very far inferior to those which aided the Reformers of the sixteenth century. Nor should we regard the errors which he mingled with his sounder opinions as likely

History of the English Law, 163.

2 Stat. 25 Edward III., c. 6 (A.D. 1350); 27 Edward III., c. 1; 38 Edward III., s. 2.

3 Note VI.