not my soul be avenged on such a nation as this?" One deeply impressed by such feelings could not be indifferent to the sacred office, nor should he be judged by estimates of what appear to be the duties of a minister of the gospel at the present period. We may consider England at that period, as in many respects resembling Judah in the days of the son of Hilkiah. Like him, Wickliff was called from the priesthood of the land, to bear testimony as a prophet before kings and rulers, and like him, was unavoidably implicated in the political events of the times. And though visitations were not sent upon England to the same extent as those inflicted upon Judah, yet the painful scenes exhibited in the civil wars of the succeeding century, show that famine and the sword came upon the land, and that the people were punished for the fruit of their doings. National crimes will bring down national judgments. Warnings are sent previously to desolations, but when the voice of the Lord, speaking by his faithful ministers, is disregarded, execution will assuredly follow. It was so in the period referred to. The wickedness and profligacy of England in the fourteenth century were extreme, the awful and certain consequences were plainly exhibited by Wickliff and his associates; many, there is good reason to believe, sought the things which concerned their peace, but the nation at large persisted in evil courses, and persecuted to death the witnesses of the truth. The calamities which followed have been but feebly depictured in the pages of history; the particulars of individual suffering are forgotten amidst details of martial enterprise. May England not forget the innumerable mercies she has since then received! may the warnings of faithful ministers of Christ not again be despised! and may our national sins never again arise to such a height as to bring national judgments upon our country!

JOHN WICKLIFF * was born about the year 1324, at a village of the same name, a few miles from the town of Richmond in Yorkshire, where his ancestors had resided from the time of the Conquest. The family were respectable, and possessed considerable property, but continued the advocates of those super

respecting the life and manners of the clergy, are sufficient and indisputable evidence. Many of these may be found in the third volume of Wilkins's Concilia. They seem wholly to have failed in effecting any moral improvement, which is not surprising when we consider the sources from which they emanated. The gross doctrinal errors inculcated by the church of Rome, even after the days of Wickliff, are explicitly asserted in the proceedings against his followers.

*The name of the reformer has been spelled in sixteen different ways. Wiclif is adopted by Lewis and Baber, and is used in the oldest document in which the name appears-his appointment to the embassy to the pope in 1374. Wycliffe is adopted by Vaughan, and appears to be the most correct. Wickliff is used in the present work as the most popular form. In those times orthography was but little attended to; in proper names especially it was much neglected.

It is

stitions which their relative earnestly laboured to remove. probable, that in consequence of the change in his views he was estranged from his own family. Under feelings of this nature he would be led to use the language of one of his tracts, in which, speaking of the errors into which worldly minded parents often fall, he says, "With much travail and cost they get great riches, and estates, and benefices for their children, and often to their greater damnation; but they incline not to get for their children the goods of grace and virtuous life. Nor will they suffer them to retain these goods, as they are freely proffered to them of God; but hinder it as much as they may; saying, if a child yield himself to meekness and poverty, and flee covetousness and pride, from a dread of sin, and to please God,—that he shall never become a man, never cost them a penny, and they curse him because he liveth well, and will teach other men the will of God to save their souls! For by so doing, the child getteth many enemies to his elders, and they say that he slandereth all their noble kindred who were ever held to be true men and worshipful."* In those days, next to the danger and reproach of being a heretic, and nearly as great, was the being accounted a friend or relative of one suspected of heresy.

All the memorial which remains of the history of Wickliff's youth is, that his parents designed their son for the church, and his mind was early directed to the requisite studies. He was entered at Queen's college, Oxford, an institution then recently founded, from whence he soon removed to Merton college, the most distinguished in the university at that period, when the number of scholars had recently been estimated to amount to thirty thousand. Wickliff's attention appears rather to have been directed to the studies suitable for his profession, than to general literature. As Fuller observes, "The fruitful soil of his natural abilities he industriously improved by acquired learning. He was not only skilled in the fashionable arts of that age, and in that abstruse, crabbed divinity, all whose fruit is thorns, but he was also well versed in the scriptures, a rare accomplishment in those

*MS. On Wedded Men, their Wives and Children.-See "The Life and Opinions of John de Wycliffe, illustrated principally from his unpublished manuscripts, by Robert Vaughan," Vol. I. p. 223; a work which supplies a more complete personal history of the reformer and his writings than any which preceded it. By the author's permission considerable use of his valuable selections has been made in compiling the present brief sketch. The life of Wiclif by Lewis is well known, and deservedly esteemed for the patient industry of the writer, and the valuable materials he has collected. It is, however, to be regretted that he did not give a more full account of Wickliff's doctrinal pieces. Vaughan has done much to supply this deficiency. Considerable assistance has also been derived from Baber's valuable sketch of Wickliff's life prefixed to his edition of the reformer's new testament. Knyghton, Fox, Hollinshed, and other early chroniclers also have been referred to.

days." Dr. James enumerates various writers, by whom he considers Wickliff to have been grounded in the truth. He doubtless learned much from the fathers, and was considerably indebted to Grosseteste and Bradwardine; but his writings show that his religious principles were mainly derived from the bible.* His perusal of the scriptures and the fathers rendered him dissatisfied with the scholastic divinity of that age, while the knowledge of canon and civil law then requisite for a divine, enabled him to discern many of the errors of popery. His writings also show him to have been well acquainted with the laws of his own country. The four fathers of the Latin church, Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine, and Gregory, are continually quoted by him, so as to show his intimate acquaintance with their writings. Augustine, in particular, he seems to have valued next to the scriptures. It will not be forgotten that Luther derived much instruction from the writings of that father. The acknowledged ability of Wickliff as a scholar, led his adversaries to accuse him of evil designs rather than of ignorance, while his friends gave him the title of the Evangelic Doctor. Even Knighton states that he was second to none in philosophy.

Wickliff's mind must have received deep impressions from an awful visitation of Providence which occurred in the middle of the fourteenth century. Europe was shaken by a succession of earthquakes; shortly after, it was ravaged by a pestilence, the effects of which were more rapid and extensive than at this day we can easily conceive. More than half the people of this and other lands were swept away; the alarmed survivors reckoned the mortality far higher. That Wickliff was deeply impressed by this awful event, appears by his frequent references thereto, when he is sounding an alarm to a careless and profane generation. Under a strong feeling that the end of the world approached, he wrote his first publication, a small treatise, entitled "The last Age of the Church," in which he describes the corruptions which then pervaded the whole ecclesiastical state, as the main cause of that chastisement which Europe had so lately felt. Early and deep impressions of this nature, evidently tended much to strengthen and to prepare the reformer for the arduous course he was shortly called to pursue. That his mind had been led to look to the only true ground of support is evident from a passage in this tract, wherein he speaks of Christ Jesus as having "entered into holy things, that is into holy church, by holy living and holy teaching;

* See The History of the Church of Christ, Vol. III., for some account of Grosseteste and Bradwardine.

+ Knighton says, that before this plague a curate might have been hired for four or five marks a year, or for two marks and his board; but after it, scarcely any could be found who would accept of a living of twenty marks a year. Archbishop Islip interfered, and forbad any curate to claim an advance of more than one mark yearly. Stow observes upon this limitation, that it induced many priests to turn robbers!

and with his blood he delivered man's nature; as Zechariah writeth in his ninth chapter, Thou verily, with the blood of witness, or of thy testament, hast led out from the pit them that were bound. So, when we were sinful, and the children of wrath, God's Son came out of heaven, and praying his Father for his enemies, he died for us. Then, much rather shall we be saved, now we are made righteous through his blood."

Thus we find Wickliff in his thirty-second year, respected for his scholastic acquirements, deeply impressed with the importance of divine truth, awakened to a sense of the divine judgments, enabled already to break through the bands of superstition, and in possession of that hope which alone can afford refuge for a guilty sinner. We shall now see how these preparations fitted him for the contest, and led him to the encounter in which he was called to engage.

The first circumstance which summoned Wickliff to this conflict was a controversy with the mendicant friars. Some of them had settled at Oxford in 1221, where they attracted much notice by their professed freedom from the avarice of the monastic fraternities in general, and by their activity as preachers. They introduced many of the opinions afterwards adopted by the reformers, for a time saying much in opposition to the papal authority, and in support of the authority of the bible. But their errors and encroaching spirit soon appeared, so that Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln, who for some years had favoured the friars, at length deeply censured their conduct. Their zeal to proselyte youths at the universities to their orders, called forth vigorous opposition from Fitzraf, archbishop of Armagh, who, in a petition to the pope in 1357, affirmed that the students of Oxford were reduced on this account to six thousand, not more than a fifth of their former number.* In 1366, a parliamentary enactment ordered that none of the orders should receive any youth under the age of eighteen; also that no bull should be procured by the friars against the universities. Similar disputes then prevailed in the university of Paris. The objections alleged against the mendicants, as stated by Wickliff, may be thus summed up :they represented a life inertly contemplative, as preferable to one spent in active attention to christian duties; they were defective in morals when discharging their office of confessors; while itinerating in the offices they assumed, they persecuted all such as they detected really travelling to sow God's word among the people;" to these may be added a full proportion of every error

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*In his tract of Clerks Possessioners, Wickliff complains that "Friars draw children from Christ's religion into their private order, by hypocrisy, lyings, and stealing." He charges them with stealing children from their parents through inducing them to enter their orders, by representing that men of their order would never come to hell, and would have higher degree of bliss in heaven than any other. For an account of Fitzraf, or Armachanus, as he was usually called, see Fox, who gives a summary of his arguments against the friars.

and vice which has been charged on the corrupt clergy of Rome. Nor did Wickliff merely expose and seek to correct these fruits of error; he showed that they proceeded from the unscriptural nature of the institutions, which evidently were opposed to those precepts of the bible, which they professed to regard.

Against these mendicants, Wickliff wrote several tracts, entitled, Of the property of Christ, Against able Beggary, and of Idleness in Beggary.* The vices of the friars led him to consider more fully the vices of the Romish priesthood.

The approval which the conduct of Wickliff, in opposing the mendicants, received from the university, appears from his being chosen warden of Baliol college in 1361. In the same year he was presented by his college to the living of Fillingham, in Lincolnshire, which he afterwards exchanged for Ludgershall, in Wiltshire. In 1365 he was appointed warden of Canterbury hall, by Simon de Islip, the founder, then primate of England.

In the instrument appointing Wickliff to this office, Islip states him to be a person on whose fidelity, circumspection, and industry he confided, one on whom he had fixed for that place for the honesty of his life, his laudable conversation, and knowledge of letters. Islip dying shortly after, Wickliff was displaced by Langham, his successor, who had been a monk, from whose decision he appealed to the pope.

The integrity and courage of Wickliff are manifest from the boldness with which he continued to oppose the mendicants, both personally and by his writings, during the time his appeal was under consideration.

Another circumstance assisted to call Wickliff into public notice. This was the decision of the English parliament in 1365, to resist the claim of pope Urban V., who attempted the revival of an annual payment of a thousand marks, as a tribute, or feudal acknowledgment, that the kingdoms of England and Ireland were held at the pleasure of the popes. His claim was founded upon the surrender of the crown by king John to pope Innocent III. The payment had been discontinued for thirtythree years, and the recent victories of Cressy and Poictiers, with their results, had so far strengthened the power of England, that the demand by the pontiff, of the arrears, with the continuance of the tribute, upon pain of the papal censure, were unanimously rejected by the king and parliament. The reader must recollect that this was not a question bearing only upon the immediate point in dispute; the grand subject of papal supremacy was involved therein, and the refusal to listen to the mandate of the

*In his writings Wickliff sometimes speaks of the houses of the friars as Caim's castles, (Cain was then so spelt,) alluding to the initial letters of the four mendicant orders, the Carmelites, Augustines, Jacobites, and Minorites. They were commonly called the White, Black, Austin, and Grey friars.

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