IT has been said that three men struck telling blows at the Roman hierarchy: Philip the fourth, John Wiclif and Martin Luther: a Frenchman, an Englishman and a German. The first opened the way for the other two. Philip IV. called the fair, that is the handsome, was the greatest of the Capetien kings, but his greatness was intellectual only. If he contributed largely to lead mankind out of the bog of superstition in which they were swamped, he did it simply to gratify his own rapacity and ambition. He was the first monarch to challenge the Church to a combat À outrance; and he succeeded in leading her captive literally as well as figuratively.

It is useless to try, as some quasi historians do, to explain the career of Wiclif without taking into consideration the state of the Church at that epoch; and if the reader is not informed on that point, he will not profit much by this essay till he has read, marked, learned and inwardly digested the previous one on the Captivity of Babylon.

Cotemporary with Philip IV. was Edward I. of England. The two were pretty evenly matched. Edward was probably the better soldier; but in his negotiations with Philip, the advantage remained to the latter. Edward married for his second wife Philip’s sister; and Edward’s son married Philip’s daughter. It was this last marriage that caused the hundred years war.

Edward’s grandfather king John, one of the basest of monarchs, had been compelled by his barons, to accept the Great Charter and solemnly to swear to observe it. He appealed to the pope Innocent III. to release him from that oath, and the pontiff consented on condition that John should cede to him in fee the kingdom of England and receive it back in tenancy as a fief of the Holy See, subject to an annual tribute of money as token of vassalage. The bargain was consummated: John was empowered to violate his oath, and his Holiness became Lord paramount of England. He received the tribute in silver and gold during the life of John and during the long reign of his son Henry III. the father of Edward. But when he, Edward, came to the throne he resolved not to be outdone by his incomparable brother-in-law, and refused to continue the tribute. The pope, Boniface VIII., did not follow up the claim with his usual tenacity. Perhaps because he already had his hands full with Philip; and perhaps because there supervened between him and Edward a negotiation of a different character. Edward at the head of an army, was pursuing his claim to the crown of Scotland. The Scotch appealed to the pope giving him a correct history of the transactions between the two kingdoms, by which the independence of Scotland was fully recognised. Boniface ordered Edward to withdraw his troops, alleging that Scotland belonged to him, Boniface—a new pretence little to the taste of the Scotch themselves. Edward denied the Scotch version, and told the pope that the English monarchy was founded by Brutus the Trojan in the time of the prophet Samuel, and that Scotland was subjugated and annexed by his Edward’s ancestor king Arthur, a prince for whose existence there was the same authority then as now, namely the rhymes of the nursery. Boniface was struck with the antiquity of the English monarchy and the deeds of the valorous Arthur, and he changed sides: he commanded the Scotch no longer to resist his beloved son in the Lord, king Edward.

Some years later we find Edward brought by his subjects to the verge of dethronement for his tyranny, and forced to ratify anew the Great Charter and swear to observe it; and then applying to Clement V. the French pope, Philip’s pope, first pope of the Captivity, for a dispensation from his oath. Great as Edward is made to appear to us in English histories, it is clear he was not the man to redeem his kingdom from the thraldom into which his grandsire had sold it. It was the paralysis of the political power of the Church effected by Philip IV., which gave scope to the innovations of Wiclif and led towards the emancipation of England.

We pass over the reign of Edward’s worthless son, and come to that of his grandson in the early part of whose reign Wiclif was born. The day of his birth is not known. The third Edward came honestly by his qualities moral and immoral. He was the grandson not only of Edward I. but of the terrible Philip. He was not an Englishman—the English blood in his veins was just a two hundred and fifty-sixth part. He was a French Spaniard with a taint of the Moor. He ground his subjects to powder by unprecedented taxation. He put the crown itself in pawn and left it there eight years. But he had inherited the unfailing sagacity of his maternal grandsire, and his people never brought him to terms by threatening to dethrone him.

If he himself did not turn upon the Church and rend her like Philip, he was ready to see others do it. For aught he cared, Wiclif and the other neologists of the day, might have gone over to the faith of his Saracenic ancestors, and translated into English the Koran instead of the Bible. Nor were his subjects much more true to the hierarchy: loyalty to the pope was no longer the vogue. Now-a-days not one Roman Catholic in a thousand knows that the see of Rome was ever anywhere else than in Rome: the Church has been remiss in disseminating information on that point; but at that time every Englishman not idiotic, knew that the pope was a Frenchman seated down on the Rhone; that the cardinals were French; that it was a Frenchman in London who received the tribute of king John when he could get it; that in fine the Church was a French industry which every honest Briton was bound to look upon with distrust.

In the previous century begging had been proclaimed as a means of grace, and this new road to heaven was eagerly seized upon by the religious orders. Even men of rank and wealth turned Franciscan or Dominican and worked out their own salvation by standing barefoot, a rope around the waist, at the corners of the streets, holding out a box for the contributions of the devout. The widow’s mite entitled her only to the formal and general prayers of the convent; but those who would make a handsome gift, were presented with a document on vellum called a letter of fraternity which gained for them special masses for the success of their schemes in this world, and for the tempering of purgatorial fires in the next. This traffic was profitable enough to attract a brisk competition among the different orders, for the monopoly; and each succeeding pontiff granted it to those who by their faith or works—chiefly the latter—had risen highest in his esteem.

England swarmed with these sturdy beggars, and this gave handle to Wiclif’s attacks not only upon them but upon monks in general. He himself was a secular priest, that is a priest belonging to no monastic order; and Roman Catholic writers aver that Wiclif’s hostility to the monks arose from party spirit; and even protestant historians do not wholly exculpate him in that regard. We know that feelings quite mundane went for something occasionally in the measures of Luther and of Calvin; and it is not improbable that Wiclif had a touch of human nature as well as they. He had been made warden of Canterbury in the place of a monk named Woodhall. The archbishop from whom Wiclif had received this appointment died, and his successor dismissed him and reinstated the monk. Wiclif appealed to the pope at Avignon, who decided against him, saying that none but monks were entitled to such preferment. Wiclif sounded the charge. He denied the pope’s infallibility; he denied his right to excommunicate except for crime; his right to extend absolution except to the penitent; his right to any temporal power, especially his claim to be Lord paramount of England by the cession of king John. He admitted that the pontiff was Christ’s vicar on earth so far as he conformed to Christ’s precept and example and no farther. As for the monks, not only their begging but some other of their short-comings more questionable were the subject of his invective; and to show them what they ought to be and to do he sent forth his poor priests as he called them, who clad in monkish garb, went into the streets and highways, not to beg but to preach the gospel and to read it to the people in English in the translation he was already making.

I have sketched the events which prepared the way for Wiclif, and it is proof of how well they had worked together for him that this opposition to the Church instead of losing for him the favor of the king, gained it. The tribute of John was in arrears, and pope Urban summoned Edward to appear before him at Avignon as his vassal, and give an account of himself. Edward was not disposed to make so long a journey for so little profit; but he agreed to send commissioners to meet those of his Holiness, at Bruges in Flanders. Wiclif had the honor of being appointed on this commission. A compromise was the result. Wiclif was rewarded for the skill he had shown as a diplomat, by being made rector of Lutterworth, and in that incumbency he spent the rest of his days.

William of Wykeham bishop of Winchester was a prelate of learning, talent and excellence. He deplored as earnestly as Wiclif the ecclesiastical abuses which reigned, and the objectionable ways of the monks. He was of a broad spirit: nice theological points never troubled him. He recked as little as Wiclif whether the Frenchman Grimoard, Urban V. was infallible or not, or whether he was entitled to the tribute of king John so long as he did not get it.[18]

But he idolised the Church and to maintain her dignity, her prerogative and even her wealth was what he lived for. Both these men were in advance of their age: the one by indifference to the prevailing superstitions, the other by a desire to blot them out. They ought have been friends; but one was a high churchman, the other a low churchman.

William of Wykeham had been chancellor of England and had resigned. In the next reign, that of Richard II., he was once more raised to that high office. In the meantime he had fallen out with John of Gaunt duke of Lancaster uncle of Richard, and that quarrel brought about an alliance between the duke and Wiclif. John was the fourth son of Edward III. and possessed the qualities of his race. He is supposed to have aimed to succeed his father on the throne, in contempt of the rights of his nephew, son of his illustrious brother the Black prince; but the boy had not yet displayed the unworthy traits which finally cost him his crown; and the memory of his father proved sufficient to guarantee the succession of one of England’s weakest sovereigns.

Finding the English throne impracticable, John attempted that of Castile, but here he met a rival whose claim was but little more valid than his, but who had got the start of him. Later the progeny of John of Gaunt and of Henry of Trastamara intermarried; and the present Houses of Hapsburg and Bourbon are descended from both of these adventurers.

Foiled in Castile duke John returned to England and plunged into politics. What the contention was between him and William of Wykeham, is not clear. It is probable that duke John was out of money, and remembering him of the manner in which his great-grandfather Philip had replenished his coffers, he was trying to defraud the Church, and that the chancellor frustrated those designs. Wiclif who was of the opinion of Agur, with a leaning towards poverty, considered the wealth of the Church as one of its abuses, and he sided with the duke. He did not serve an ingrate, for when at length he was arraigned before the bishop of London to explain his opinions, he walked into court accompanied by John of Gaunt on one side, and John’s friend Percy earl marshal of England on the other. Wiclif was feeble in body, and lord Percy told him to sit down. Not with my permission, said the bishop. Then without it, growled John of Gaunt, and he added that if the bishop put on airs he would drag him from his seat by the hair of his head. The session broke up in disorder; and one of the many inexplicable circumstances connected with Wiclif’s history, is that the populace who took the part of the bishop, vented their discontent not on Wiclif but on his lordly abettors.

Later, duke John abandoned Wiclif but not wantonly or without an effort to fetch him round to what he regarded a common sense view of the case. Politics had shifted, and the duke was on the side of the Church. He suggested to Wiclif that it was time for him to turn his coat also, and finding him obstinate he left him to his own devices for a pragmatical disturber of the public peace. It was inconceivable to John of Gaunt that a man of genius could be in earnest about what he considered as nothing more than the futilities of the schools.

Wiclif’s greatest work was his translation of the scriptures into English; but his version was not one that we would accept to-day for our guidance. It was the translation of the translation of a translation. Let us look a little into its pedigree: Some years before the birth of Christ, the old testament was translated into Greek. This version is called the Septuagint, because, according to the legend, seventy-two learned doctors were shut up in seventy-two separate cells and set to making seventy-two separate translations of the Hebrew scriptures. They accomplished the task in seventy-two days, and when they came to compare notes their seventy-two versions all agreed word for word letter for letter. There could be no doubt of the inspiration of a work so miraculous; and such was the authority of the Septuagint that the citations of the old testament in the new, are taken from it. The Church of Rome at an early day translated the Septuagint and the Apocrypha into its adopted tongue the latin, and this version is known as the old Vulgate. In the course of ages, and they were dark ages, by careless transcription and by the foisting in of strange theological ideas, the Vulgate had become corrupt, and such was its condition when Wiclif translated it. Two hundred years later the Council of Trent revised it and brought it into its present form. It is now the ultimate Bible of the Church Catholic Apostolic and Roman, from which there is no appeal: the original Hebrew and Greek go for nothing when they differ from it. Do you ask why? I answer that the Church is inspired as well as the Bible, and inspiration for inspiration, the later must supercede the earlier. You protestants have merely gone back and picked up the exhausted material of the Church, and made out of it a sort of Bible of your own, instead of accepting the better provision she offers you; and it distresses me to add that the Council of Trent has consigned you all to perdition for rejecting the Apocrypha.

Scripture in Wiclif’s day was a new revelation for the people, and the reading of his Bible was eagerly listened to; but some enthusiastic writers dilate upon its wide spread circulation, forgetting that the art of printing was then unknown, and that every copy was in manuscript, and that too not in the facile running hand of the present era, but in black-letter printed out, so to speak, with the pen. Le Bas estimates that a New Testament alone cost the equivalent of thirty pounds sterling money of his day which was early in this century—say two hundred dollars of our time, at which rate the whole Bible would cost say one thousand dollars. There were but few persons in the fourteenth century who could buy such books and but few who could read them.

The style of Wiclif’s Bible is simpler and clearer than the rest of his English. Green says that Wiclif’s style is a model, and that he was the father of our modern vernacular; but this is disposed of by better authority. Sharon Turner says that Wiclif’s style was inferior to that of some of his cotemporaries. Vaughn[19] whose biography of Wiclif is an almost continuous panegyric, says his style is repulsive and unintelligible. Le Bas says it is barbarous. Knight’s history says it is so obscure as to defy interpretation. The truth is, Wiclif like many another man of genius, had not the minor gift of phrase-making; and the better English of his Bible was owing to his collaborators who possessed that gift. Wiclif with the rest of his knowledge, had self-knowledge: he knew his own defects and how to obviate them.

As for his opinions they were fluctuating; and different writers give different accounts of them. His eulogists say they were progressive; his enemies that he recanted. Hume says he had not the spirit of a martyr, and was ready to explain away his doctrines whenever they put him in danger; but it is probable that such was the unpopularity of the French hierarchy that he ran no risk of martyrdom. He was not only left undisturbed in his cure of Lutterworth, but in spite of his opinions he was made one of the royal chaplains at the accession of Richard II.

We find him at one time appealing to the pope against the archbishop of Canterbury; at another, calling his Holiness a purse-kerver that is a pick pocket. Some of his expressions seem to call in doubt the existence of purgatory; but he upholds masses for the dead. He adheres to the seven sacraments, but he not only condemns the restrictions of the Church on the marriage of relatives, he approves of that connection between those more nearly allied in blood than is now sanctioned by modern legislation. He was no doubt betrayed at times by the sharpness of his own dialectics. His was the logic of the schools, the logic of the nominalists and the realists, of Abelard, Aquinus and Dun Scotus, a logic by which anything might be proved or disproved at choice.

The most important and most difficult question is what were his opinions of the Eucharist. It is commonly said that he denied Transubstantiation. But how far did he deny it?

The term transubstantiation was not known till the twelfth century. For eleven hundred years, Christian theology had subsisted without it; and when it came, it came as all words come—the product of evolution. It is not known at what time the idea was first formulated that when Christ said this is my body; this is the blood of the new testament, he taught that there was no longer any distinction of entity or identity between himself and the bread and wine he held in his hand—that he was they, and they were he. This dogma, shadowy at first, grew more and more palpable till it developed into a word to express itself. But the theologians still imagined a difference. Did Christ on that occasion annihilate the bread and the wine, and substitute for them himself so utterly that the physical qualities of bread and wine still apparent to the senses, were a delusion? If he did, it was unqualified or major transubstantiation; if he did not, it was qualified or minor transubstantiation which after a time took the name of Consubstantiation. The latter was the creed of Wiclif. He admitted the Real presence; he declared that the bread after consecration, was the very body that hung upon the cross; but he held that the inner somethingness of bread, as he expressed it, still remained. Thus far and no farther did he deny transubstantiation. Archbishop Trench says Wiclif escaped one danger only to fall into another equally great. The distinction between the two was a mere logomachy which had no practical effect on his conduct. He cleaved to the Mass; and it was at the celebration of that rite in his own church at Lutterworth that he received his death shock.

Can the Mass exist without transubstantiation major or minor? Let us see. The Mass is not a mere church service, it is a sacrifice, a renewal of the Atonement, a rehearsal of Calvary. The consecrated Bread is the body and blood which suffered crucifixion; it is the Host, the victim. The priest raises it on high, and the people fall and worship it; Wiclif worshipped it. Is this idolatry? Not if God himself lies on that silver paten.

Had Wiclif been born sixty years later, we never should have heard of him: such a career as his would have been impossible. The House of Lancaster had then usurped the throne, and sought to strengthen its claim by subservience to the see of Rome. I say Rome in italics because the Captivity had lapsed into the Great Schism—a pope at Rome and a pope at Avignon—England was of the obedience of the former, France of the latter. The odium theologicum was reËnforced by the odium politicum; and while any English priest might vent one or both, with impunity and applause, upon his Holiness at Avignon, he would risk his life if he tried it upon his rival Holiness at Rome.