§ 41. wyclif's teachings. 3-35
Quotations, bearing on their vices, would fill a large volume. Entire treatises against their heresies and practices issued from his pen. They were slavish agents of the pope's will^; they spread false views of the eucharist ;. they made merchandise of indulgences and letters of fraternity which pretended to give the purchasers a share in their own good deeds here and at the final accounting. Their lips were full of lies and their hands of blood. They entered houses and led women astray ; they lived in idleness ; they devoured England. ^
The Reformer had also a strong word to say on the delusion of the contemplative life as usually practised. It was the guile of Satan that led men to imagine their fancies and dreamings were religious contemplation and to make them an excuse for sloth. John the Baptist and Christ both left the desert to live among men. He also went so far as to demand that monks be granted the privilege of renouncing the monkish rule for some other condition where they might be useful. ^
The four mendicant ordecg, the Carmelites, Augustinians, Jacobites or Dominicans, and Minorites or Franciscans gave their first letters to the word Caim, showing their descent from the first murderer. Their convents, Wyclif called Cain's castles. His relentless indignation denounce.d them as the tail of the dragon, ravening wolves, the sons of Satan, the emissaries of anti-christ and Luciferians and pronounced them worse than Herod, Saul and Judas. The friars repeat that Christ begged water at the well. It were to their praise if they begged water and nothing else.^
With the lighter hand of ridicule, Chaucer also held up the mendicants for indictment. In the Prologue to his Canterbury Tales he represents the friar as an —
. . . easy man to yeve penaunce, Ther as he wiste to have a good pitaunce For unto a powre order for to give Is signe that a man is well y-shrive.
1 Engl. Works, III. 420 sqq. ; Op. evang., II. 40; Lat. serin., IV. 62, 121, etc.
2 See the tract Of Feigned Contemplative Life in Matthew, pp. 187, 196 ; De eccles., p. 380; Lat. Serm., II. 112.
3 Lat. serm., II. 84; Trial, IV. 33 ; Engl. Works, III. 348; Dial, pp. 13, 65, etc.
336 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1294-1517.
His wallet lay biforn him in his lappe Bretful of pardoun come from Rome all hoot, A voys he hadde as smal as hath a goot Ne was ther swich another pardonour For in his male he hadde a pilwe-beer [pillow] Which that, he seyde, was our Lady's veyl: And in a glas he hadde a pigges bones.
— Skeat's ed., 4 : 7, 21.
If it required boldness to attack the powerful body of the monks, it required equal boldness to attack the mediaeval dogrrip, of transubstantiation. Wyclif himself called it a doctrine of the moderns and of the recent Church — novella ecclesia. In his treatise on the eucharist, he praised God that he had been delivered from itslaughable and scandalous errors.^ The dogma of Vy the transmutation of the elements he pronounced idolatry, a l}dng fable. His own view is that of the spiritual presence. Christ's body, so far as its dimensions are concerned, is in heaven. It is efficaciously or virtually in the host as in a symbol.2 This symbol " represents " — vicarius est — the body.
Neither by way of impanation nor of identification, much less by way of transmutation, is the body in the host. Christ is in the bread as a king is in all parts of his dominions and as the soul is in the body. In the breaking of the bread, the body is no more broken than the sunbeam is broken when a piece of glass is shattered : Christ is there sacramentally, spiritually, efficiently — sacramentaliter, spiritualiter et virtualiter. Transubstantiation is the greatest of all heresies and subversive oi logic, grammar and all natural science^^
The famous controversy as to whether a mouse, partaking of the sacramental elements, really partakes of Christ's body is discussed in the first pages of the treatise on the eucliarist. Wyclif pronounces the primary assumption false, for Christ is not there in a corporal manner. An animal, in eating a man,
1 Ab isto scandaloso et derisibili errore de quidditate hujus sacramenti, pp. 52, 199.
2 Corpus Chr. est dimensionciliter in codo et virtualiter in hostia ut in signo. Deeuchar., pp. 271,303. Walden, Fasc. ziz., rightly represents Wyclif as holding that " the host is neither Christ nor any part of Christ, but the effectual sign of him." " De euchar., p. 11; Trial., pp. 248, 261.