Lewis Sergeant

“ She speaks to the angry citizens and deftly turns their anger. "Let none ever tell me again he is the enemy of my son . . . your darling child, Richard. Are your fears more lively than a poor weak female's? than a mother's? yours, whom he hath so often led to victory, and praised to his father, naming each—he, John of Gaunt, the defender of the helpless, the comforter of the desolate, the rallying signal of the desperately brave!" She stands surety for his loyalty and allegiance, and the fickle mob cheer the Duke as well as herself. ”

“ By the social upheaval there was created in England, between the Plantagenet and Tudor epochs, nothing less than the English people—a people emancipated, dignified by independent industry, annealed by common interests and resolutions, energetic, honest, and self-respecting. These were the operative forces which in fact produced the people of England as we know them to-day, which worked with silent and subtle machinery amidst the transient din and chaos of the fifteenth century. ”

“ Though the Good Parliament had had so short an existence, and its work was overruled as soon as it had been dissolved, there can be no question of its importance as a landmark of constitutional history. It is important also from our immediate point of view; for one cannot but be startled to find a man like Wyclif, irreproachable in his moral character, whose every act reveals a roused and wakeful conscience, engaged in public affairs on the side of a man so incongruous, unsympathetic, and unpopular, as John of Gaunt. ”

“ And assuredly Wyclif had suffered and was yet to suffer more than enough to convulse a stronger man. His life had been a perpetual struggle, and within the last seven or eight years he was never free from keen antagonism. The friars and monks had poured the vials of their wrath upon him. One Pope had launched five bulls against him, and another was already being urged to summon him to Rome. The Primate and nine bishops had solemnly denounced him as a heretic. The Chancellor of his beloved University had condemned him in the open schools, and forbidden him to teach what he believed to be true. ”

“ Long despised by the Norman Court and aristocracy, from the French queens and their favourites down to the humblest hanger-on of the ruling classes, and equally despised by the clergy, monks, friars, and lawyers, whose debased Latin was their only current coin of speech, the language of our English forefathers suddenly, almost dramatically, stood forth as the dominant tongue in every department of the national life. ”

“ Islip came to Canterbury at a critical moment. The ever memorable visitation of the plague in 1349 and the following years—a visitation by which (we are asked to believe) as many as one quarter of the human race was cut off within four years: one half of the population of England in little over a year: one hundred thousand in London alone—produced new outbursts of religious enthusiasm, and contributed largely to the moral and intellectual development of the fourteenth century. The Black Death was the benefactor of society which it dissolved, and of humanity which it decimated. ”

“ We want to feel sure, and we are only just beginning to feel it, that the man to whom every lover of truth is so largely indebted stands before us as a recognised presence and identity, in his form and substance as he lived; the brilliant Oxford man who paced the pavements of the schools, or haunted the streets and meadows between his college and the silver streams, passing the very spot where, two centuries later, bishops such as his soul would have loved were to light a candle for the faith as he believed it ”

“ Now it is above all things important to remember that Wyclif took this significant stand as the direct heir of the Schoolmen—as a Schoolman himself, interpreting and giving effect to their views, wedding action to thought, not only by his individual energy and initiative, but in obedience to national character and scholastic training. Some injustice has been done to the Schoolmen by constantly speaking of them as though they were men of disquisition only, chop-logics in a narrow groove, industrious tillers of a barren soil. ”

“ Ah, Lord Jesus Christ! since within few years men paid their tithes and offerings at their own will free, to good men and able, for the worship of God and the profit of Holy Church fighting on earth, must a worldly priest destroy this holy and approved custom, constraining men to abandon this freedom, and turning tithes and offerings into wicked uses! ”

“ If the Pope really gave England to John, as a lord gives to his vassal, he gave it for a ridiculously small fee; and on the same principle he might squander the rest of Christendom in the same way. We ought to make a stand at once. And as the theologians say that a man who is in mortal sin forfeits his dominion, and the Pope is liable to sin, one mortal overlord is quite enough for us, and we had better give our goods to the poor instead of to the Pope, and hold of Christ alone. ”

“ Hence the men of intellectual energy, who in other ages might have been effective as philosophical inquirers, were condemned to feed upon the mere husks of knowledge, to beat the air and walk the vicious circle, mumbling inconclusive dialogues on universal ideas, on nominalism and realism, on grace and predestination and free-will, bound down meanwhile to the orthodox theology of Rome, with no better alternative and outlet than the logic and metaphysics of Aristotle, the comments of Averroes, and the subtleties of the Angelic Doctor. ”

“ The adventurous pioneer of the college cloister or university lecture-room, the innovating spirit of the tractarian or the homilist, the missionary zeal which organizes and sends forth an army of Christian soldiers, the hardihood which converts a simple priest into a politician, a socialist, a champion of the dregs of humanity—we too have known them all within the limits of a lifetime, and each in many varying forms. ”

“ Wyclif writes on this point, "is it reason to constrain the poor people to provide a worldly priest, however unworthy of life and of knowledge, in pomp and pride, covetise and envy, gluttony and drunkenness and lechery, in simony and heresy, with fat horse and jolly and gay saddles, and bridles ringing by the roadside, and himself with costly clothes and pelure, and to suffer their wives and children, and their poor neighbours, to perish for hunger, thirst, cold, and other mischiefs of the world? ”

“ In regard to Peter's pence especially, pious founders left their benefactions for the Church of England alone, that the clergy might live thereby, and give the rest in alms. Before allowing any of this wealth to leave the country, our rulers should take immediate steps to check the abuse, moved thereto by thinking of the souls of the departed, of their own responsibility, and of the safety of the realm. All the world would laugh at our "asinine folly" if we who dared to invade other countries for secular causes were afraid of holding back trust-funds in the name of God from unworthy claimants. ”

“ In his political action and sympathies Courtenay was probably, to the best of his judgment, patriotic and loyal to the core. At Oxford, as we have seen, he fought splendidly for his university, and with special gusto against the friars who owned allegiance to Rome. As an ecclesiastic he fought still more splendidly for the English Church against the two tyrannies (as he could not but think them) which threatened to crush out her life. No cause could have a stronger, a more determined and undaunted champion ”

“ It must have been patent to everybody that the strength of the rebellion was broken; and no man would see this more plainly than John Ball, who knew his countrymen so thoroughly. Even if he had faith to believe that the serfs had not struck their blow for freedom utterly in vain, he must have felt that he and his immediate friends had nothing to expect from the clemency of their enemies. ”

“ The citizens had been stirred, no doubt, as Oxford had been stirred, and liberal-minded Christians throughout England, by a moving appeal just circulated far and wide over London and the provinces. It was an anonymous tract, vigorous and eloquent, calling upon all good clerks and Christians to stand together at that important crisis, and rally in defence of the conclusions of Wyclif, and the independence of the English Church. ”

“ Confirmation is not necessary to salvation. Confession of sins to a priest is superfluous for a contrite man. Extreme unction is unnecessary, and not a sacrament.
All kinds of religious Orders confound the unity of the Church of Christ, who instituted but one Order, the Order of service. Vows of virginity are a doctrine of devils; and the worship of saints borders on idolatry. It is needless to visit the shrines of saints; the miracles alleged to be performed there may be only delusions of the devil. It is lawful to appeal in ecclesiastical matters and matters of faith to the secular prince. ”

“ We can easily imagine what arguments the primate would employ to convince the Lords of the wisdom and necessity of a prosecution. When John Ball had been condemned to death Courtenay had obtained for him a respite of two days, during which he had wrestled with the "mad priest "for his soul; and he may have been able to assure his colleagues in perfect good faith that he had traced out all the ramifications of the doctrine which began in the schools and the Latin treatise, and ended in revolt against the government and the assassination of the chief ministers of the Crown. ”

“ The distinguishing marks of this great uprising of the serfs were its spontaneity throughout the south-eastern counties, its lack of organisation, and, so far as one can see, the complete absence of recognised leaders to whom men could look for guidance and direction. The seething irresolute mob, so recently inarticulate, if not absolutely unvocal, had raised its huge limbs without a brain to control them, and had found a voice which proclaimed that forced labour and servitude of any kind should come to an end in England. ”

“ One of the most interesting facts in connection with the life of John Wyclif, which has contributed as much as anything else to fix him in the popular imagination, and to place him permanently on the roll of English heroes, is that he elected to play the part of a politician as well as of a theologian, and that, being a priest and a Schoolman, he joined hands with the statesmen of his age, in order to secure what could not be obtained without their aid. No institution was ever reformed in the absence of co-operation from within ”

“ To say that it is physically God is idolatry. To say, as some of us do, that what I see and handle are accidents without a subject is only another way of saying that the 'hoc est corpus,' which made Christ visible to the eye of faith, also made that wheaten bread into something infinitely inferior in the scale of nature—lower than the peasant's bean-bread, lower than the soil in which the grain of wheat germinated; for they have substance as well as accidents, but this unhappy phenomenon retains its accidents after losing its substance. ”

“ Possibly London had not changed its mind and its sympathies in regard to Wyclif, except that Gregory's bulls must have made it more Wycliffite than ever; but John of Gaunt had almost ceased to vex the citizens. They were enthusiastic for the Princess Joan, who had not concealed her liking for the Court preacher; and they had men to lead them, like brave John of Northampton, who had boasted that no bull from the Pope of Rome should harm John Wyclif within the liberties of the city. ”

“ But if the physical resemblance between Wyclif and Knox is noteworthy, still more so is the parallel presented by the leading events of their lives. Both were born and bred in the Latin rite, and became conspicuous as secular priests of the Roman Church. Knox, at St. Andrew's, and Wyclif, at Oxford, clung to the courts of their beloved universities, and there, with a passionate zeal for truth, half led and half followed the men of their day in a moral revolt against the later doctrine of Rome. Both, between the age of forty and fifty, came to be recognised as teachers of religious liberalism ”

“ The great historian, from whose judgments so few of his successors are competent to dissent, regarded the Schoolmen as writers only. He does not mention Marsiglio, nor deal with Wyclif as a Schoolman. He expresses disappointment with what he had read of Ockham; but he had not directed his attention to the political association of Marsiglio, Ockham, and Michael of Cesena with Ludwig of Bavaria, nor to that of Wyclif with the English court. Indeed it is only in the present generation that full light has been cast on the innovating and revolutionary spirit of the later Schoolmen. ”

“ Though covetous clerks are mad through simony, heresy, and many other sins, and despise and impede Holy Writ as much as they can, yet the unlearned people cry after Holy Writ to know it, with great cost and peril of their lives. For those reasons and other, with common charity to save all men in our realm which God will have saved, a simple creature hath translated the Bible out of Latin into English. ”

“ If we could penetrate more deeply into the historical sources of human action, and trace each visible effect back through its proper channel to the centre of its causation, how dazzling would be the light which would thus be shed on the course of every national and personal development. How interesting, for example, it would be if we could recognise the exact measure of the survival of race antagonism between the English serf and the feudal and manorial lords, who had inherited three centuries of mutual enmity. ”

“ Writing to Oxford, the Pope declared that he could not but wonder and lament that, by their sloth and laziness, the authorities of the University permitted tares to spring up amongst the genuine wheat of their famous soil, and not only to spring up but, still more pernicious, to come to maturity, without taking any trouble to root them out. ”

“ It is impossible without a vigorous effort of the imagination to realise the condition of our ancestors between the middle of the eleventh century and the middle of the fourteenth, divided as they were in heart and sympathy from the ruling race by this most effectual of all barriers, and thrown back upon themselves not only in matters connected with law and government, but also, as it must have been to a very large extent, in religion and social life. ”

“ Above all and once again, woe to the obstinate tongue of the apostate who buries the Roman Church beneath a pile of false utterances, whereby he pretends that the later Church, when opposed to the earlier, has rectified the faith, declaring that this sacrament is an accident without a subject, and not actual bread and wine, as both the Gospel and the canon of the Church affirm. For Augustine is our witness that no priest of Christ can make an accident without a subject. ”

“ Even before he threw himself into politics—before he became chaplain to the King and made the acquaintance of John of Gaunt, who was some twenty years his junior—Wyclif seems to have been as widely known as a man could be in those days, with no higher title to fame than that he was a learned Oxford doctor, a bold and vigorous preacher, and an upholder of the poor. ”