sary, chancellors, proctors, doctors, and their servants, to exhume Wiclif's body. The bones were burnt to ashes, and were then

"Then

cast into the Swift, a river running close by the town. the brook," says Fuller, "conveyed his ashes into Avon; Avon into Severn; Severn into the narrow seas; they into the main ocean. And thus the ashes of Wiclif are the emblem of his doctrine, which was dispersed the world over." Tradition yet marks out the spot where this poor and ineffective revenge was perpetrated.

The whole life of this celebrated reformer was devoted to the great enterprise of exposing ecclesiastical enormities, of vindicating the simplicity of gospel truth, and of resisting the inroads of ecclesiastical assumption. That such pursuits exposed him to the charge of being a sour and turbulent demagogue,—that some even of those who, like John of Gaunt, patronized him so long as he served their purpose, afterwards deserted him, and that many of his friends drew in their breath with a shudder at the boldness with which his opinions were avowed, The day in which his singleness and nobility of purpose should be manifested was

who can doubt?

*It was currently reported that miracles attended this circumstance, expressive of the displeasure of Heaven at this removal. It is not worth while to relate them in detail.

long in coming. And it can never fully come whilst any of the errors which he lived to expose survive. Yet will he appear to some "that limb of the devil, enemy of the church, deceiver of the people, idol of heretics, mirror of hypocrites, author of schisms, sower of hatred, and inventor of lies."* But, if prejudice can enact attainders, virtue and truth can reverse them; and Wiclif's name will stand an example to posterity of the moral palingenesis by which the apparently destroyed existence lives again from its ashes, and will supply encouragement to believe that successors may profit extensively from the very truths which now cover their propounder with ignominy and disgrace. The realms of oblivion are crowded by those who wrote or spoke in accordance only with the sentiments of their day. The renowned are mainly those who opposed the current.

The spirit of Wiclif's reformation was immensely in advance of its age. He was, indeed, to some extent, an advocate for the interference of the civil magistrate in matters of religion. But to what extent he meant this interference to reach, may be learned from the following passage:

"Let what they solicit from the magistrate be simply protection, and to meet the evils arising from the withholding of settled pastors from the established cures; and the many which must be inseparable from the appointment of improper men, let such priests as may prefer the labors of the evangelist to the more regular duties of the parochial shepherd, be allowed to act on that preference." Wiclif's opinions on this subject are susceptible of both explanation and apology.

The

The history of England may be divided into two great periods, both bearing on "the constitution in church and state." former was one in which our ancestors sought to ally the spiritual with the civil power, that they might ward off the encroachments of a secular hierarchy; the latter, one in which dire experience caused them to retrace their steps, and to seek relief from the

* If Wiclif was occasionally somewhat coarse, Walsingham, the papal advocate, and the author of the above sentence, is more than his peer.

injuries which this ecclesiastico-political system had engendered. We shall have many occasions to refer to the latter class of opinions. At present we may mainly dwell on the former. A conviction seized the most far-seeing men, during the period of the Anglo-Norman rule, that the power of spiritual despotism, then represented by the court of Rome, "had increased, was increasing, and ought to be diminished ;" and to accomplish the latter purpose was a leading object with princes or people, as the case might be, down to the time of Henry VIII. The reformation was caused by that monarch's sensual desires, only as it is the last drop which causes the cup to overflow. William I. was, it is well known, encouraged by Pope Alexander III. to undertake the conquest of the kingdom of Edward the Confessor, that by such means Rome might obtain an increased power. But that iron-willed despot, when his victory was achieved, was so far from yielding the allsubmissive compliance expected of him, that not even the menaces of Hildebrand himself could exact from him the homage required by the Roman see; and he strictly forbade all relations between his subjects and the pope not sanctioned by himself. The selfishness and rapacity of his successor, Rufus, were great reductions, for the time, on the power of the clergy, who long remembered them. Under Henry the First arose the dispute respecting investitures: Hildebrand demanded the abolition of the ceremony by the king; but whilst the monarch altered the ceremony he still retained the right of appointment, and thus substantially obtained the victory. The daring resistance of Thomas à Beckett to Henry II., who claimed the right of punishing felonious offences committed by ecclesiastics, led to the enactments of "The Constitutions of Clarendon," which, though issuing in the great and protracted troubles consequent on that archbishop's murder, drew a stricter limit around the usurpations of the papal prerogative.

*Investiture was the act by which the feudal lord placed his vassal in actual possession of his fief. In ecclesiastical preferments, it was originally effected by the sovereign delivering to the newly-appointed bishop his ring and crosier.

John attempted a still further limitation, though his shallow and reckless scheming ended only in his own debasement. Under the weak-minded Henry III., the claims prepared by the pope to appoint to vacant benefices, whilst thus trampling on the rights of patrons, caused great disaffection even among the clergy themselves, and this dissatisfaction was still further increased by the immense sums received by foreigners bearing the titles of English ecclesiastics, for services which they performed only by proxy. In this contest respecting "provisors," as they were termed, Grossteste, the Bishop of Lincoln,* eminently distinguished himself as an opponent of the pope, by his refusal to induct an Italian boy into a vacant benefice. Nor must we be unmindful of two other most signal events in British history, the efforts made by Cardinal Langton to gain the great charter, or the contention till death of Simon de Montfort in behalf of a parliamentary representation, both of which occurrences greatly contracted the circle of ecclesiastical sovereignty. Edward I., in defiance of the bull of Boniface VIII., and of the excommunication which it threatened against those who taxed the clergy against his authority, had recourse to the severest exactions from the ecclesiastics to support the expenses of his war against France; and, by an express act, he prohibited his clergy from sending moneys to their foreign superiors. In the following reign-in which Wiclif was born. so alive had the people become to this subject, that one of the complaints against Edward II. was that he had permitted bulls from the Roman see.

In fact, the civil power was, in those days, regarded as a harbor of refuge from the distresses consequent on hierarchical tyranny. If the convictions of our forefathers shall differ in some respects from our own, we must be content to remember that their experience was less wide and extensive than that of a later age; that learning consists greatly in un-learning; and that truths of the largest magnitude are of slow and often almost imperceptible growth. We must judge our forefathers by the light in which they lived; whilst we cannot restrain the conviction that the same * "Terrificus Papæ redargutor," as Camden styles him.

principles, opposed to the same errors, would, under different circumstances, and conjoined with a wider experience, have landed them far beyond the point which they ultimately reached. The supremacy of God's Word, the right of private judgment, the voluntariness of true Christianity, the simplicity and energy of moral power, the self-contradiction of systems of worldly policy as means of advancing the progress of truth, — for all these doctrines were those which Wiclif maintained, are principles which would have carried him further than he really went. The inconsistency was in the limited degree in which they were then applied; the truths are immortal and all-sufficient. We may not reduce them; we cannot exaggerate their moral power.

NOTE. The author confesses a general obligation for the matter of the preceding chapter to Vaughan's able Life of Wycliffe.