of Our Lady, or the swatch of the sail of St. Peter's Fishing Boat."

LETTERS OF

3

These Letters of Fraternity were singular instruments of greed, enrolling rich men as a kind of associate members of the monastic orders, after which they were entitled to the benefits of all the works done throughout the order.' It is interesting to FRATERNITY. note what Wyclif himself says of them: "I am willing to say of these Letters in Latin what I have formerly said in English, for it is important to know something of their history. If this be well understood, the simoniacal heresy of those selling them will be immediately manifest, for they do not issue such rules except in the expectation of realizing gain and of giving strength to their unlawful confederacy. Beyond doubt there is implied in this practice a fraudulent buying and selling; and it is equally certain that God must hate this abominable traffic.

"On many grounds it is evident that the friars selling these letters have fallen into a radical heresy, for they pretend expressly in them that the individuals to whom they grant them shall be made partakers of merits from themselves after death. But where can you find a more presumptuous blasphemy? For neither they themselves nor the men with whom they carry on this traffic can know whether they may not be condemned in hell. How blind, then, is their folly in making assertions on a subject on which they know so little! But they are, it seems, of such innate tendency to falsehood that they do not hesitate to assert, contrary to eternal judgment, that they can do things which in reality they cannot do. Again, if they promise to another man that after death he shall be a partaker of their merits, they manifestly imply both that the man himself will after death be worthy of such participation, and that they themselves at present merit future happiness; because if each party should be a foredoomed member of Satan,' then such a granting must be beyond the power of these friars.

"The friars, by the letters which they so assiduously display to the people, give plain indication that they say unto the people that they themselves are holy and grave men in the Church, and, what 1 Art. John Wyclif, in Church Quar. Rev., Oct., 1891, pp. 131, 132. Buddensieg gives some pertinent quotations from Wyclif on the Friars in his John Wiclif, pp. 151–155.

2 See Ducange, Gloss., s. v. Fraternitas, where the formula of admission is given.

See Select English Works of John Wyclif, ed. T. Arnold, Oxf., 1869–72, i, 67, 380, iii, 420 ff.

4

Wyclif was an Augustinian in his predestinarianism.

is more than the sounding of a trumpet before them, they send forth letters to confirm the impression of their sanctity, which men are to preserve constantly in their chests. Many simple people, however, confide as much in these frivolous letters as in an article of faith like that of the communion of saints, or salvation by Christ. Will, then, a man shrink from acts of licentiousness and fraud if he believe that soon after, by the aid of a little money bestowed on friars, an active absolution from the crime he has committed may be obtained? Accordingly this heresy is supposed to be the cause why the faith of the laity is found to be 80 wavering."

This may be taken as an excellent illustration of Wyclif's dealing with one of the best cherished institutions of the Church. Wyclif's later years were marked by the issuing of his theological tracts and writing his Latin books-forestalling the Reformation in the vigor, definiteness, and scriptural

WYCLIF'S

WRITINGS.

ness of his views. He saw that the great need of the people was a knowledge of God's word. "Christians ought to travail day and night," says he, "upon the text of Holy Writ, especially upon the Gospel in their mother tongue. And yet men will not suffer it that the laity should know the Gospel and read it in their common life in humility and love. Covetous clerks of this world reply and say that laymen may soon err, and therefore they should not dispute of Christian faith. Alas! alas! what cruelty is this, to rob a whole realm of bodily food because a few fools may be gluttons and do harm to themselves and others by their food taken immoderately. As easily may a proud worldly priest err against the Gospel written in Latin as a simple layman err against the Gospel written in English. . . . What reason is this if a child fail in a lesson at the first day to suffer never children to come to lessons for this default? Who would ever become a scholar by this process What antichrist is this who to the shame of Christian men dares to hinder the laity to learn this holy lesson which is so hard [strongly] commanded by God? Each man is bound to do so that he be saved, but each layman who shall be saved is a real priest made of God, and each man is bound to be a very priest.

?

The thoroughly Protestant tone of these words is to be noted. The New Testament was translated first and by Wyclif, and completed about 1382; the Old Testament was translated by Nicholas

'See Buddensieg, as above, pp. 156-159.

Pref. to Transl. of Gospel Harmony. See Forshall and Madden's ed. of the Wyclif Bible, and Lechler, p. 213.

WYCLIF'S
BIBLE.

Hereford, one of the leaders of the Wyclif party at the university, and by others. Both translations were from the Vulgate. The work of Hereford was suddenly interrupted by a citation to appear before a council in London, from which he appealed to the pope, and by him he was imprisoned for years. Wyclif multiplied copies of the translation both of the Bible as a whole and of parts, placed them in the hands of his preachers, and thus England was saved from the reign of ignorance and superstition which has cursed the Latin races of Europe. The Church tried in every way to destroy all copies of Wyclif's versions, but it utterly failed in this. Numerous manuscript copies exist in English libraries, and we infer that Wyclif's Bible was widely circulated. A thorough revision was undertaken by Wyclif's learned pupil and ministerial assistant, John Purvey, and completed about 1388. Wyclif's Bible and prose writings were the creators of our modern English. As Luther opened the period of the new High German, so Wyclif laid the foundations among the common people for the present English speech. Chaucer wrote more for the higher classes, but Wyclif spoke to the heart of the nation, and it is to his perspicuous, nervous, forceful, direct Middle English speech that we owe the fixing of our language in those general features which Shakespeare and the English Bible of 1611 have made eternal.'

Wyclif's last days were spent at Lutterworth in writing and preaching those earnest sermons which thrill us to this day, and in

1 It is not, says Shirley, "by his translation of the Bible, remarkable as that work is, that Wyclif can be judged as a writer. It is in his original tracts that the exquisite pathos, the keen, delicate irony, the manly passion of his short nervous sentences, fairly overmaster the weakness of the unformed language, and give us English which cannot be read without a feeling of its beauty to this hour" (Fascic. Zizan., p. xlvi). Writers on Wyclif and publishers of his Bible have often confounded the earlier version of Wyclif and Hereford with the revision of Purvey. Thus John Lewis, the first important biographer of Wyclif (1720), published the revision of Purvey as the original translation of Wyclif-The New Testament, translated out of the Latin Vulgate, by John Wiclif, about 1378 [should be 1382], Lond., 1731; and this was reprinted in 1810 by H. H. Barber and in 1841 by Bagster in his Hexapla. Adam Clarke was the first to publish the original version of Wyclif and Hereford-albeit only the Song of Songs-which he did in his Commentary from a manuscript in his own possession. The New Testament in this version was not published until Lea Wilson issued it in London in 1848. It was left to Rev. Josiah Forshall and Sir Frederick Madden to thoroughly investigate every fact relating to Wyclif's Bible, and to republish the original version and Purvey's revision in parallel columns, with an invaluable Introduction, Lond., 1850, 4 vols., large 4to.

the active duties of a parish priest. He was at last cited by Urban V to Rome to answer for his heresies, but growing infirmities compelled him to refer the pope to the citation of God, thus manifested, as forbidding him to go. An attack of paralysis carried him off on the last day of 1384.'

'Vaughan, Life and Opinions of Wycliffe, ii, 224, and John de Wycliffe, a Monograph, p. 468, to whom Wyclif literature owes a vast debt, says that Wyclif was engaged in administering the eucharist when seized. This is an innocent extension of the statement made by the oldest sources, Audiens missam in ecclesia sua de Lyttywort circa elevationem sacramenti altaris decidit percussus magna paralysi, according to Gascoigne, from the report of John Horn. See Lewis, Wiclif, p. 336; Lechler, p. 422. He was stricken while hearing the mass, not while officiating.

CHAPTER III.

WYCLIF'S ITINERANT PREACHERS.

PROFESSOR SHIRLEY was the first to call attention to Wyclif's anticipation of Wesley's itinerancy-the resemblance between the "poor priests" and "Wesley's lay preachers such as they were while his strong hand was upon them." Nothing illustrates better Wyclif's practical genius than his determination to sow England deep with evangelical principles by sending out priests and laymen -for he employed both-armed with copies of the gospels and epistles which he had just translated, and with his vigorous English tracts and pamphlets. They went forth in long garments of coarse woolen cloth, barefooted, with staff in hand, as pilgrims, wandering from village to village, town to town, preaching, teaching, warning, wherever they could find hearers-in church, churchyard, street, and market place. The Church authorities were deeply enraged by this itinerant propagandism of heresy, and Courtenay, Archbishop of Canterbury, calls attention "to certain unauthorized itinerant preachers, who set forth erroneous, yea, heretical assertions in public sermons, not only in churches, but also in public squares and other profane places, and they do this under the guise of great holiness, but without having obtained any episcopal or papal authorization.""

The sermons of Wyclif's preachers were simple presentations of Gospel facts and ethics, especially the latter, which they enforced with great vigor and plainness of speech. They were sent out by Wyclif from Oxford and Lutterworth, their special field of activity being Leicestershire, though they extended beyond that, and their time was in the last part of Wyclif's life, perhaps 1375-82. Wyclif wrote many tracts, both in English and Latin, in defense of them, one of which, De Graduationibus Scholasticis,

1 Fasciculi Zizaniorum, Lond., 1858, p. xli. The first modern biographer of Wyclif, Lewis, hardly mentions the poor priests, but that enthusiastic Wyclifite, Robert Vaughan, does full justice to this aspect of the reformer's work. See his Life and Opinions of Wycliffe, 2d ed., rev., Lond., 1831, ii, 163 ff. Lechler is full and satisfactory here, as everywhere, 2d ed., Lond., 1884, 189 ff. Wesley himself never mentions Wyclif.

2 Wilkins, Concilia, iii, 158.