formulas was forgetting the essence of Christianity. The direct relation of the individual to God without these interventions was the positive result of his negative criticism. This idea seems to form the basis of all his objections and of all his scepticism. This was the centre of a rather unsystematized crowd of thoughts which he threw out on the world, which have sometimes been regarded as detached and chaotic.

The same principle appears in his attitude towards church services. The degree to which a rite increased the real devotion of the people was, he declared, the test of its propriety. He found that intoning and elaborate singing took the mind off the meaning of the prayer. He quoted St. Augustine's dictum "as oft as the song delighteth me more than that is songen, so oft I acknowledge I trespass grievously." This became a favorite text with his followers. By the same standard, he judged that the splendid building and gaudy decoration of churches drew away the minds of the worshippers. In that age, whatever deterioration there might be in other spheres of ecclesiastical activity, the unbroken but progressive tradition of Gothic architecture still continued to fill the country with achievements as noble as any that the art of man has accomplished. The simple magnificence of the Early English style was being gradually modified, so as to exhibit larger quantities of delicate tracery. At the same time the church services, in the hands of armies of choristers and chantry priests, were being adorned by music more difficult and by intoning more elaborate than the old Gregorian chants.

But what were these new beauties to the class of men who find no reality of worship under such forms, and who require something altogether different by way of religion? To their needs and thoughts Wycliffe gave expression in language which, compared to his language on some other subjects, is extremely moderate. But his demand was distinct, and it was founded on a want deeply felt by many of his countrymen. We are not surprised to find that the Lollards in the next generation found no comfort in the services of the Church, and for lack of conventicles "met in caves and woods." A distinctive character was thus given to the worship of the new English heretics; it was a worship essentially Protestant, and did not depend for its performance on priest or Church.

Although we have no account of the meetings of these first nonconformists, their character can be gathered from the writings of Wycliffe and his followers, who again and again insist on the greater importance of preaching and the smaller importance of

ceremonies. Preaching, they declared, was the first duty of clergymen, and of more benefit to the laity than any sacrament. The sermon was the special weapon of the early reformers; it was the distinguishing mark of Wycliffe's poor priests. Their chief rivals in this art, as in everything else, were the friars, of whose sermons there were always enough and to spare. But Wycliffe accused the friars of preaching to amuse men and to win their money, making up for want of real earnestness by telling stories more popular than edifying. He wanted an entirely different class of preacher, one who should call people to repentance, and make the sermon the great instrument for reformation of life and manners. To Wycliffe preaching seemed the most effectual means by which to arouse men to a sense of their personal relation to God, and of the consequent importance of their every action. Absolution, masses, pardons, and penance commuted for money were so many ways of keeping all real feeling of responsibility out of the mind. "To preach to edifying" became the care of the Lollards, in the place of ceremonies and rituals.

He regarded the Virgin Mary in a spirit halfway between the Mariolatry of his contemporaries and the fierce anger with which Knox threw her image into the waters as a "painted bred." He has left us an interesting treatise entitled Ave Maria, in which he holds up her life as an example to all, and especially to women, in language full of sympathy and beauty. But he does not advise people to pray to her. He does not speak either in praise or condemnation of the images of the Virgin, which then looked down from every church in the land.

Although he did not generally indulge in tirades against idolatry, he mentions the mistaken worship of images as part of other superstitious practices attaching to the popular cultus of saints; he puts it on the same footing as the foolish adoration of relics, the costly decoration of shrines, and other ways in which pilgrims wasted their time and money. Wycliffe was not the first or only man of his time in England to be shocked by these practices. Langland, whose Piers Plowman was generally read among all classes ten or twenty years before the rise of Lollardry, had in that great work spoken even more severely of the popular religion, and used the word idolatry more freely than Wycliffe. Chaucer's gorge rose at the Pardoner and his relics of "pigge's bones." The impulse that Wycliffe gave was therefore welcome to many, and was eagerly followed by the Lollards, who soon became more distinctly iconoclastic than their founder, and regarded saints, saints' days,

and saint-worship with a horror which he never expressed. But his other doctrines of the relation of man to God and of man to the Church, his new ideas of pardon and absolution, were the only effective engine for the destruction of those abuses and vulgarities which Langland and Chaucer vainly deprecated.

Against the persons and classes who lived by encouraging superstition, Wycliffe waged implacable war. He recognized that as long as the orders of friars existed in England it would always be hard to fight against the practices and beliefs which they taught. His views on monks and on bishops, respectively, were much the same. His objections to them all were founded on the belief that they were the real props of all he sought to destroy, the sworn enemies of all he sought to introduce. After his quarrel with the friars, he put these thoughts into a definite formula. All men, he declared, belonged, or ought to belong, to the "sect of Christ," and to that alone. The distinguishing mark of the members was the practice of Christian virtues in ordinary life, whether by priest or layman. The body had therefore its rule, the Christian code of morality. He found, he said, no warrant in Scripture to justify any man in binding himself by another code of religious rules, or becoming a member of any new sect. Yet that, he said, was what the monks and friars had done. They claimed to be "the religious," more dear to God than other men. But their rule was of earthly making, the work of Benedict, or Francis, not of Christ; there was really only one rule of life, and that was binding on all Christians equally. Religion did not consist in peculiar rites distinguishing some men from others. Wycliffe affected also to regard the worldly prelates and clergy, who held secular office and secular property, as another "sect." The pretensions and selfinterest of the Church, and the intense party spirit actuating the authorities, gave a certain meaning to the word. A powerful and jealous organization, dangerous to the State as well as fatal to individual freedom of religious practice, was very far from that idea of the Church which Wycliffe thought he found in the histories of the early Christian community. . .

The pope had no place in Wycliffe's free Church of all Christian men. "If thou say that Christ's Church must have a head here on earth, sooth it is, for Christ is head, that must be here with his Church until the day of doom." This complete repudiation of papal authority was the last stage of a long process. Until the time of the schism he had done no more than state the fallibility of the pope, and expose papal deviations from the "law of God."

When in 1378 his enemy and persecutor Gregory the Eleventh died, he welcomed the accession of Urban the Sixth, and hoped to see in him a reforming head of Christendom. He was soon disappointed. The anti-pope Clement was set up at Avignon, and gods and men were edified by the spectacle of the two successors of St. Peter issuing excommunications and raising armies against each other. Then, and not till then, Wycliffe denied all papal power over the Church.

The positive basis which Wycliffe set up, in place of absolute church authority, was the Bible. We find exactly the same devotion to the literal text in Wycliffe and his followers as among the later Puritans. He even declared that it was our only ground for belief in Christ. Without this positive basis, the struggle against Romanism could never have met with the partial success that eventually attended it.

As for a new scheme of church government, Wycliffe cannot be said to have put one forward. He pleaded for greater simplicity of organization, greater freedom of the individual, and less crushing authority. As his object was to free those laymen and parsons who were of his way of thinking from the control of the pope and bishops, he proposed to abolish the existing forms of church government. But he never devised any other machinery, such as a presbytery, to take their place. The time had not come for definite schemes, such as were possible and necessary in the days of Luther, Calvin, and Cranmer, for success was not even distantly in sight. The position of the Lollards was anomalous, standing half inside and half outside the Church.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Loserth, The Beginnings of Wyclif's Activity in Ecclesiastical Politics in the English Historical Review, 1896, pp. 319 ff. Lechler, Life of John Wyclif. Capes, History of the English Church in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. Gee and Hardy, Documents Illustrative of English Church History.

PART IV

THE TUDOR AGE

CHAPTER I

THE NEW LEARNING ERASMUS AND MORE

THE development of Tudor absolutism after the battle of Bosworth helped to direct into peaceful channels the forces which had been wasted and checked by feudal and dynastic conflicts. The rapid expansion of ocean trade gave the requisite opportunities for the numerical increase of the trading and industrial classes, and the correlated classes such as the lawyers. The introduction of the printing-press stimulated intellectual activity which quickly widened the range of man's interests and speculations. This general European awakening was represented in England by many distinguished men, among whom Colet, More, Grocyn, and Linacre stand out most prominently. With this group is often associated Erasmus who, though born at Rotterdam, was cosmopolitan by nature and spent some time in England. Several of these men of letters while loyal to the authority of the Church Universal were keenly alive to many existing abuses in Church and State, and in two famous works, the Praise of Folly and the Utopia, Erasmus and More gave free swing to the spirit of criticism. Of these two books, Seebohm, in his Oxford Reformers, gives an entertaining account.

§ 1. Erasmus Writes the "Praise of Folly" While Resting at More's House (1510 or 1511)1

To beguile his time, Erasmus took pen and paper, and began to

1

Seebohm, The Oxford Reformers, 3d edition, pp. 192 ff. and 346 ff. By permission of Frederick Seebohm, Esq., and Messrs. Longmans, Green, & Company, Publishers.