THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
ee
sure, the battle which had been begun over the theses was lost to sight in the significance attaching to the more vehement one that he waged against the monastic orders when he saw the hopes quenched which had gathered around the ‘“‘reform pope,” and when he was withdrawn from the scene as an ecclesiastical politician and occupied himself exclusively with the question of the reform of the Church. His teachings concerning the danger attaching to the secularizing of the Church must have put Wyclif into line with the mendicant orders, 13. Attack since in 1377 Minorites were his defendon Monas- ers. If he took the mendicants at that ticism. time to be an order worthy of honor, whose zeal for poverty he praised to the skies, there appear in the last chapters of his De civili dominio traces of a rift. Upon his making the statement that ‘the case of the orders which hold property is that of them all,” the mendicant orders turned against him; and from that time Wyclif began against them a fight which grew sharper all the time even till his death. This battle against the imperialized papacy and its supporters the “sects,” as he denominated the orders, finds a large space not only in such of his large later works as the Trialogus, Dialogus, Opus evangelicum, and in his sermons, but also in a series of sharp tracts and polemical productions in Latin and English (of which those issued in his later years have been collected as ‘‘Polemical Writings”). In these he teaches that the Church needs no new sects; _sufficient for it now is the religion of Christ which sufficed in the first three centuries of its existence. The monastic orders are bodies which have not the least support in the Bible, which rejoice in vices, cause harm to Church and State, and must be abolished together with their haughty possessions. Such teaching, particularly as it was brought forward in sermons, had one immediate effect—in London and other cities there was produced a serious rising of the people. The monks were deprived of their alms and were bidden in accordance with these doctrines to apply themselves to manual labor. These teachings had more important results upon the orders and their possessions in Bohemia, where the instructions of the ‘Evangelical master”? were followed out to the letter in such a way that the noble foundations and practically the whole of the property of the Church were sacrificed. But the result was not as Wyclif would have had it in England—the property fell not to the State but to the barons of the land. The scope of the conflict in England widened; finally it involved no longer the mendicant monks alone, but took in the entire hierarchy as it was then constituted, the unflagging zeal of Wyclif carrying it along. An element of the contest appears also in Wyclif’s doctrine of the Lord’s Supper (see below). To his proposition that the Bible ought to be the common possession of all Christians was due the fact that it now was made available for 14. Relation common use in the language of the to the Eng- people. Indeed the national honor lish Bible. seemed to require this, since there were members of the nobility who possessed the Bible in French. Wyclif set himself to the task. While it is not possible exactly to define the part
which he had in the translation—which was on the basis of the Vulgate—there can be no doubt that the inception was due to his initiative, and that the successful carrying out of the project was due to his leadership. From him comes the translation of the New Testament, which was smoother, clearer, and more readable than the rendering of the Old Testament, which was done by his friend Nicholas of Hereford (q.v.). The whole was revised by Wyclif’s younger contemporary John Purvey (q.v.) in 1388. Thus the mass of the people came into possession of the Bible; but the cry of his opponents may be heard: ‘The jewel of the clergy has become the toy of the laity.”” As a matter of fact, not merely those
who bore a proud name, but members of the middle
class possessed it, and in spite of the zeal with which the hierarchy sought after heretical books and aimed to destroy it utterly, and in reality did, in course of time, do away with very numerous copies, there still exist about 150 manuscripts, complete or partial, which contain the translation in its revised form. From this one may easily infer how widely diffused it was in the fifteenth century. For this reason the Wyclifites in England were often designated by their opponents as “Bible men.” Just as Luther’s version had great influence upon the German language, so Wyclif’s, by reason of its clarity, beauty, and strength, worked mightily upon the English tongue.
Another task to which Wyclif gave himself was
preaching and the care of souls, himself toiling as preacher to the people and as their
15. Activity teacher. Inasmuch as it was his deasa sire to do away with the existing hier-
Preacher. archy on the ground that it had no
warrant in Scripture, he put in the place of its members the “poor priests’? who lived in poverty, were bound by no vows and had received no formal consecration, and preached the Gospel to the people. These priests as itinerant preachers spread abroad among the people the teachings of Wyclif. Two by two they went barefoot, clad in long dark-red robes and carrying a staff in the hand, this latter having symbolic reference to their pastoral calling, and passed from place to place preaching the sovereignty of God. The bull of Gregory XI. impressed upon them the name of Lollards (q.v.), ° intended as an opprobrious epithet, but it became later a name of honor. Even in his time the “Lollards” had reached wide circles in England and preached “God’s law, without which no one could be justified.”
In the summer of 1381 Wyclif formulated his doctrine of the Lord’s Supper in twelve short sentences, and made it a duty to advocate it everywhere. Then
the English hierarchy proceeded
16. Anti- against him. The chancellor of the
Wyclif University of Oxford had certain of the Synod. declarations pronounced heretical. In the auditorium this fact was announced
to him, whereupon he declared that neither the chancellor nor any other could change his convictions. He then appealed—not to the pope nor to the ecclesiastical authorities of the land, but—to the king. He published his great confession upon the subject and also a second writing in English in-