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PROCEEDINGS
AT THE
WYCLIFFE SEMI-MILLENNIAL
CELEBRATION,
BY THE
merican jib It $ºtist,
Held in the Academy of Music, New York, December 2, 1880,
Zo Commemorate the First Translation of the Hoſy Scriptures into the
Anglish flanguage, by
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NEw York:
A M E R I C A N B I B L E S O C IET Y,
INSTITUTED IN THE YEAR MDCCCXVI.
I 88 I.
UIN1 v Elvis: i Y OF MICHiGAN
GENERAL LIBRARY
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PROCEEDINGS
AT THE
WYCLIFFE SEMI-MILLENNIAL
CELEBRATION,
Ameritan $ible $ntiety,
Held in the Academy of Music, New York, December 2, 1880,
7o Commemorate the First Translation of the Holy Scriptures into the
English Language, by
310 h m ſitu cliffe.
Mºš
NEW YORK :
A M E R I CAN B I B L E SOCIETY,
INSTITUTED IN THE YEAR MDCCCXVI.
I 88 I.
Tºyſ
4405
A52
Table of Øontents.
OUTLINE OF THE PROCEEDINGs . * }
Ae
PRAYER, By Roswell D. HITCHcock, D. D., LL.D.
ADDRESS, BY THE HON. Joshua L. CHAMBERLAIN
ORATION ON JOHN WycLIFFE AND THE FIRST ENGLISH
BIBLE, BY RICHARD S. STORRs, D. D., LL.D. .
ADDRESS, By CoRTLANDT PARKER, ESQ.
**
ADDRESS, BY ENOCH L. FANCHER, LL.D.
BENEDICTION, BY THOMAS E. VERMILYE
D. D., LL.D.
I3
6I
67
71
Outline of the £roceedings,
THIS Commemoration, for which the Board of Managers had made
the most careful preparation, and to which many had been looking
forward with high hopes, proved to be an occasion of unparalleled
interest.
More than four thousand persons gained admission to the Academy
of Music by ticket; and it is quite impossible to conceive how any
company of people could be assembled in one place more thoroughly
representative of the intellectual force, the culture, the dignity, the
moral worth, and the godliness of this vast community than was that
body which met, on the evening of the second day of December, to
commemorate the work of JOHN WYCLIFFE as the Translator of the
First English Bible.
Promptly, at the hour designated for opening the exercises, the
platform being crowded by the distinguished guests who had been
specially invited by the Board to attend, FREDERICK S. WINSTON,
Esq., one of the senior Vice-Presidents of the Society, in a few
well-chosen words, introduced one of his associates in office, the
HON. JOSHUA. L. CHAMBERLAIN, of Maine, as the presiding officer
of the evening.
At the President's request, the vast assembly rose and united in
singing, to the tune of Coronation, the hymn beginning,
“All hail the power of Jesus’ name !”
It was true worship—reverent, hearty, grand. We do not expect to
be more profoundly impressed by any service of Song until we are
permitted to join the “great multitude, which no man could number.”
The REv. G. F. KROTEL, D.D., pastor of the Holy Trinity
Lutheran Church in this city, then read the nineteenth Psalm and
the last three verses of the first chapter of Second Peter. Prayer
was offered by the REv. ROSWELL D. HITCHCOCK, D.D., LL.D.,
president of the Union Theological Seminary.
6 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration.
At the conclusion of the devotional exercises, the President de-
livered a pertinent and eloquent address, and introduced the REv.
RICHARD S. STORRS, D.D., LL.D., as the orator of the evening. For
an hour and forty minutes the speaker held the fixed attention of
the audience.
To have been there will prove a perpetual joy. The speaker's
grouping of historic facts displayed the skill of a master. Many
passages of the oration were full of power; but the effect produced
by his description of the influence of Wycliffe's version of the Scrip-
tures upon the life of the English people was simply overwhelming.
When he said, “The lowly English roof was lifted to take in heights
beyond the stars,” it seemed well nigh impossible that the pent-up
sympathies of the audience could be longer held under restraint, and
yet it was evident that the climax was in reserve. It was reached
in a moment more, when he pronounced the memorable words, “The
bands of darkness broke apart, and the universe was effulgent with
the lustre of Christ!” Staid and dignified men, under the sway of
the speaker's eloquence, found tears in their eyes; and the thousands
present, moved by the magnetism with which the very atmosphere
was charged, burst out into loud and long-continued applause.
After the conclusion of DR. STORRS’s address, a resolution of
thanks to the orator, and a request for a copy of his address for
publication, was moved by CoRTLANDT PARKER, ESQ., of New
Jersey, and seconded by the HoN. ENOCH II. FANCHER, LL.D., of
New York. Both speakers are Vice-Presidents of the Society, and
their addresses possess qualities of sterling merit, and are especially
valuable in their presentation of important points which the plan
of the principal address did not fully compass.
As MR. FANCHER took his seat, the President said, “What is
the pleasure of the Society and of this assembly 2 Those who are in
favour of adopting this resolution of thanks to DR. STORRS will
please signify it by rising in their places.” The entire audience at
once arose. Two stanzas of the hymn beginning,
“From all that dwell below the skies,”
and the familiar Doxology of Bishop Ken, were then sung most
heartily to the tune of Old Hundred, and the great company received
the Benediction from the venerable THOMAS E. VERMILYE, D.D., LL.D.,
senior pastor of the Collegiate Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of
this city.
WYCLIFFE SE MI - MILLENNIAL
CELEBRATION.
£rauer, bu 330gue11 33.34itchcock, 43.33.,3:32.33.
O LORD, our Lord, how excellent is Thy name in all the
earth ! Who hast set Thy glory above the heavens; who
humblest Thyself to behold the things that are in heaven,
and in the earth; who art of purer eyes than to behold
evil, and camst not look on iniquity. Doubtless Thou art
our Father, though Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel
acknowledge us not. Thou didst love us from the founda-
tion of the world, and, in the fullness of time, didst send
Thy Son to save us.
We thank Thee for the revelation Thou hast made of
Thyself in the world around us, which proclaims Thine eter-
nal power and godhead; we thank Thee for the revelation
made in us who bear Thine image; but, above all, do we
thank Thee for the revelation vouchsafed unto us in the
blessed volume of Thy word. We thank Thee for those
holy men of God who spake as they were moved by the
Holy Ghost; whose line is now gone out through all, the
earth, and their words to the end of the world. We thank
Thee for Thy great gift unto our fathers in the father-land,
and, through them, unto us who now for these many
generations have heard in our own tongue, wherein we
were born, the wonderful works of God.
8 TWycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration.
We thank Thee for the memory of Thy servant, whose
precious gifts of nature and of grace, whose steadfast
endurance of contradiction, hatred, and hardship, and
‘whose great service on our behalf, we celebrate to-night.
As he rises now upon our vision, may we catch something
of his martyr-spirit, and be moved to do our part in con-
tinuance of his blessed work.
Command Thy benediction upon the occasion which has
called us together. Bless us, each and all, speakers and
hearers; and help us all in the prayer which our Lord
hath taught us: Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed
be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on
earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily
bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those
who trespass against us. And lead us not into tempta-
tion; but deliver us from evil: For Thine is the kingdom,
and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.
3ddress, bu žom. 3ſoghua 3. (ſhamberlain.
THE circumstances under which I so unexpectedly
occupy this chair forbid my attempting any address worthy
of the place so courteously offered in your programme.
One thought, however, I may express: We meet to-night
to celebrate, not an accomplished fact, an event which
has passed, but rather a present and potent source of
influence, scarcely midway in its career. It is well, doubt-
less, to turn back in memory to the great characters and
great deeds of heroic days. It refreshes and braces the
spirit to drink again at the fountains. But to-night we
do this, and more. We celebrate noble beginnings,
living powers, prolific of results long and wide-reaching,
whose goal and measure can only be found in the con-
summation of human history.
The great translations of the Bible into the common
tongue have appeared in stirring times; whether as cause,
or consequence, or concomitant of these, it is not easy
to say. But the Bible in the hands of the people has
been associated with movement, and never with stagna-
tion. I do not mean to assert that its influence is revolu-
tionary. As a revelation of God's will and saving grace
to man, it was doubtless a complete revolution for sys-
tems of ethics and religion, and also for thought and
life. But as a social force, as revealing man to himself
in his duties and rights, his capacity and destiny, it has
been conservative and gradual in its effects. Its process
has been by evolution rather than revolution. We cannot,
for instance, hold Wycliffe responsible for the agrarian
and socialistic revolts which marked and followed his
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10 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration.
times. His Bible was an enlightenment and a power,
disclosing men to themselves and quickening in them
the craving for that deliverance from evil which is the
crowning prayer, as it will be the crowning fact in his-
tory; but it did not prompt men to wanton and wicked
assaults on the orderly and peaceful courses of social
advancement.
The stirring history of that Bible we shall listen to
With delight from the distinguished orator of this occa-
sion. Suffer me only to dwell a moment more on the
thought with which I began—the abiding and growing
influence of the English Bible.
For two great peoples it has happened, that the com-
mon version had a powerful influence on the common
speech. Applied to the expression of vital and heart-
reaching truths, and answering the deepest questions of
the soul, it seized upon the inmost strength and sweetness
of the native idiom of home and life. This being at a
formative and characteristic stage of its growth, it may
be said that the common version held fast and conse-
crated the mother tongue. Who does not know how
deep inwrought into the life of German and English-
speaking peoples are these divine thoughts in homely
phrase !
The effect of this—aside from the great fact that this
is the Word of Life in whatever tongue—on the character
and destiny of these peoples, can hardly be estimated.
And when we think how fast the English speech is
becoming the language of commerce and civilization—
more potent far than that of courts and courtesy—we
may not yet be able to conjecture the extent of influence
to which it is destined. As was said long ago of the
Spanish flag, and afterwards so eloquently of the English,
that “the sun never set upon it,” so may it with far more
truth be said of our English Bible, that the sun in all
his course rises on no meridian of the earth where this
Bible light is not keeping its watch. Nay, rather be it
said, it is itself a never-setting sun, whose light, shining
Address, by Hon. J. L. Chamberlain. 11
from the east unto the west, is reflected back to the orient
whence it sprung.
But the figure falls short of my meaning. For, beyond
what I have suggested, when we consider the missionary
homes and mission churches all over the world, where our
English Bible-tongue is a known, familiar speech, and the
imagination seeks to trace the blessings that will radiate
and spread from all these little points of light, they seem
to encircle the earth like the luminous belts that gird the
distant stars—or, even like the heavenly galaxy, a stream
of star-dust growing into worlds.
But to return to our own country. This is the only
one in history which may be said to have been founded
in the spirit and on the precepts of the Bible. Hence
has grown, I believe, the peculiar prosperity of our
country. And this book and its teachings remain still
the charter and safeguard of our liberties, as of our
salvation. Sad and dire indeed would be the day—which
God grant may never dawn or darken on the land—when
the American people should cease to study and know the
Word of God. ſº
Whatever modified interpretations advancing science,
or thought, or life may open ; whatever may be found
best as to methods and places of study, whether day
schools, or Sunday schools, or the home circle, most indis-
pensable of all; let us never let go from our hearts and
hands that guide and guardian of life for each and for
all. How otherwise, indeed, can we deal with the great
social questions of the day ? This cry of the poor and
lowly, of those whom the march of civilization seems to
crush to the earth, cannot be answered by the cold maxims
of political economy or the theories of government. A
different force and a different spirit must traverse, and be
transfused into, both our economics and our politics. It
is not our broad territory, not our rapidly increasing
population, not our vast and growing wealth, not the
multiplicity and extent of our industries, which will save
the Republic. It is not this or that distinguished man
12 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration.
in the highest place, not the triumph of this party or
that party, which will enable us to meet the ends of
organized society, which is the well-being of the people.
It is rather by carrying into practical effect in all our
human duties the téachings of this sacred Revelation—
that there are different gifts indeed and many members,
but one body, and Christ the head.
Friends, a duty rests on us to make these truths real
in life. It is for us to say what meaning these words,
began five hundred years ago, shall have to those who,
on another night like this, shall traverse the history of
a thousand years.
©ration, by 33ichará š. Storrs, 33.39., £3.39.
MR. PRESIDENT: LADIES AND GENTLEMEN :
ON the left bank of the Rhine, on the site of the
ancient Roman camp, afterward an imperial colony, which
is associated in history with Tiberius and Germanicus,
with Agrippina, mother of Nero, and with the early fame
of Trajan, has been recently completed a magnificent work
of religion and of art, of which more than six centuries
have witnessed the progress. After delays immensely pro-
tracted, after such changes in society and government, in
letters, arts, and in prevalent forms of religious faith, that
the age which saw its solemn foundation has come to seem
almost mythical to us, by contributions in which peoples
have vied with princes, and in which separated countries
and communions have gladly united, the cathedral of
Cologne has been carried to its superb consummation, and
the last finial has been set upon the spires which at length
fulfil the architect's design.
Attendant pomps, of imperial pageantry, were natu-
rally assembled on such an occasion; but they can have
added no real impressiveness to the structure itself, with
its solid strength matching its lofty and lovely proportions,
the vast columns of the nave lifting upon them plume-like
pillars, the majestic choir, of stone and glass, with its soft
brilliance and exquisite tracery, beautiful as a poet's
dream, the soaring open-work of the spires absorbing and
moulding hills of rock in their supreme and ethereal grace.
It seems impossible not to apply to it the words which
AUTHOR’s NOTE.-On account of the length of the following discourse, portions
of it were omitted in the delivery, which are retained in the printed copies.
14 TWycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration.
Gibbon applied to St. Peter's: “the most glorious struc-
ture that ever has been applied to the use of religion.”
It is impossible not to rejoice that the common senti-
ments of beauty and of worship survive the changes of
civilization, so that distant centuries join hands in the
work now finished and crowned, and the completion of this
grandest of cathedrals in Northern Europe fitly attracts
the attention of Christendom. *
It is a Work at first sight insignificant in comparison
with this, which we have met to commemorate this even-
ing: the translation of the Scriptures into the common
English tongue, begun by John Wycliffe five centuries
ago, and brought to completeness in these recent days
by the hands of English and American scholars. It may
seem that the vision of the majestic cathedral is too
stately and splendid to be set in front of a story so simple,
and in parts so familiar, as that which we are here to recall.
But I think it will appear that the work which we cele-
brate is the nobler of the two; that from all the costly and
skillful labours, now completed on the banks of the Rhine,
we arise to this: even as there one advances to the altar,
supreme in its significance, through the decorated door-
ways, along the vast nave, and under the rhythmic and
haughty arches. To us, at least, the voice of God be-
comes articulate through the book; while the building
only shows us the magnificent achievement of human
genius, patience, and wealth, bringing to Him their un-
surpassed tribute.
It is, however, a very plain tale which I have to tell;
and the interest of it must lie in its substance, not in any
ornaments of language or of thought associated with it.
In order to tell or to hear it aright we have to recall many
things which lie back of it, which alone can set it clearly
before us.
That the governing authorities in the Christian world
should have ever refused to the revered Scriptures, on
which the common faith was founded, the widest distribu-
tion in the various languages spoken by the peoples hold-
Oration, by Dr. Storrs. 15
ing that faith, is a fact so peculiar that we easily ascribe it
to a crafty ambition or an arrogant self-will, and dismiss it
as thus superficially explained. We forget how deeply
rooted it was in an immense system of thought and of
government, and through what silent organic processes it
came to evolution into custom and rule.
Of course it contradicted the earlier usage and plan of
the Church. The Hebrew and Chaldaic Scriptures had
been written in the dialects familiar to the people among
whom and for whom they were prepared, before and after
the Eastern captivity. When Greek became a customary
speech with those dispersed in distant cities, the Alexan-
drian version of these Scriptures was made; and, as we
know, in the time of the Master, it was commonly read
and reverently expounded by the teachers of religion, as
it afterward long continued in use with Christian converts.
The Evangelists and Apostles, after the Lord had left
the earth, wrote accounts of his life, with arguments of
doctrine, precepts, promises, and prophetic admonitions, in
the language familiar to themselves and their disciples—
the vigorous, copious, Hellenistic Greek, to which the
commerce of the time had given wide distribution, while
the Septuagint had given it consecration. They sought
to reach not scholars only, or lettered persons, but all peo-
ples who shared in the general culture, and all classes of
people, with the writings upon which their souls were
engaged, and in which they felt themselves moved and
helped by the Divine Spirit. The preference of St. Paul
was shared by all; it was his preference when dictating or
tracing the large and slow characters, as well as when
preaching: “I had rather speak five words with my under-
standing, that by my voice I might teach others also, than
ten thousand words in an unknown tongue.” And it was
by these Scriptures, in the language which then had chief
currency in the world, and in which the Roman Law itself
was subsequently written, that the knowledge of Him
in whom is the light and the hope of mankind was soon
distributed over vast Spaces.
16 TWycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration.
Yet again, as Subsequent need arose that the Scriptures
be put into other languages, to reach more directly re-
moter peoples, this was done without opposition, with en-
couragement indeed, of Church authorities. So came the
early Latin versions, for use in North Africa or in Italy,
in the Second century. So came the later translation of
Jerome, from the originals, which became afterward practi-
cally the Bible of Western Christendom. The Syriac ver-
sion, which before the end of the second century carried
the Scriptures to the Euphrates, followed by others in the
same tongue; the Thebaic, and Memphitic, which made
them equally at home on the Nile; the AEthiopic, of the
fourth century; the Gothic, of the same period, made by
Ulphilas; the Armenian, of the fifth century; the Arabic,
Persian, and all the others, to the Sclavonic of the ninth
century, reveal the same impulse of wisdom and zeal, as
all are designed to bring the quickening Word of God
into contact with those to whom the Hebrew and the
Greek were not familiar. Certainly, for centuries after the
Ascension, it would have seemed as absurd to restrain the
Scriptures to languages not understood by the people, as
it would have been on the crest of Olivet to thrust veils
of darkness beneath the cloud which received the Lord,
and to leave the disciples uncertain of his glory. The
latest and fiercest Roman persecution, under Galerius and
Diocletian, aimed especially to destroy the Church by
destroying its sacred and life-giving books.
Perhaps nothing else more signally shows the novel
and alien character of the power which in subsequent cen-
turies grew up in Christendom than does the fact that
it wholly departed from these primitive traditions, and
wrought against them, of settled purpose, with restless
energy, by an instinct of its nature. I need not repeat the
story of its rise. I may only remind you how its porten-
tous physical development allied itself naturally with a
peculiar doctrine and temper, as the primitive popular
church-organization, whose picture is ineffaceably preserved
on immortal records, gave place by degrees to the splendid
Oration, by Dr. Storrs. 17
and vast imperial system, enthroned in the capital which
still fascinates the fancy and awes the imagination of the
cultivated world, having prelates for its princes, and extend-
ing its sway more widely over Europe than had the Empire
which it followed and surpassed.
This system was by no means wholly for evil. Un-
doubtedly, certain needs of the time found in it their spe-
cial supply, and important benefits to mediaeval society are
fairly ascribed to it. It held the tumultuous populations of
Europe to some degree of civilized order, amid stupendous
changes and strifes, the fall of the Empire, the in-rush of
barbarians from wood and waste, the utter breaking up of
the ancient governing order of things. When the sov-
ereignty of force threatened to become the law of the
planet, it asserted the supremacy of the spiritual order
over the secular, in Divine adjustments. It built mon-
asteries, for those who sought equally seclusion and
society, with industry, study, and the worship of God.
It defended those monasteries by sanctions of religion,
which even breasts that wore mail, and hands that held
lances, had to regard. It preserved in their libraries the
scattered remains of the classical literature, as well as
the Scriptures; and by the labour of monks it multi-
plied copies of what thus was preserved, and transmit-
ted them to us. It built cathedrals, and abbey-churches,
vast poems in stone, which inspire the fond admira-
tion of Christendom by their melodious and consecrated
beauty. It established universities, for the teaching of
its doctrines, but with an inevitably wider effect on
the culture of mankind. It proclaimed the “truce of
God,” to mitigate and restrain, where it might not
prohibit, the savage and sanguinary combats of men.
It loosed the bonds of human slavery from multitudes
of victims, and honourably refused to recognize distinc-
tions of bond or free among its officers. It made the
stoutest baron tremble, in the ecstasy of his passiou,
before the invisible energy of the curse with which it
could blast his cruelty or his lust. Sometimes, indeed,
2
Wycliffe.
18 TWycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration.
upon kings themselves, when their tyranny was most
fierce, it laid a hand far heavier than theirs, and held
them in enforced and reluctant submission.
Surely it was something to have peoples thus taught
that there was an authority higher than of princes, a
right more imperative, a tribunal more august. And I
cannot but think it beyond dispute that a power was
exerted from the banks of the Tiber, in different direc-
tions, between the fifth and the fourteenth centuries, to
restrain some of the most malign evils, and encourage
some of the germs of good, in that fateful and perilous
time. It taught the nations, however obscurely, their .
Christian relationship to each other, and prepared the
way for International Law; while the out-ranging mis-
sions of Europe, for the conquest of the heathenism
which still girt it about, took steadiness, ardour, and a
regulating order, from this vast Church authority, and
smote with more effective impact upon the mighty ring
of darkness.
The whole system which thus took the place in
Europe of the earlier, simpler Christian economy, and
whose existence was for many generations the sovereign
fact in the history of the Continent, appears now an
anachronism, as truly as tournaments, feudal keeps, or
iron helmets. The terrible crozier, before which baton
and lance went down in fear, has no more place for such
use in our times than has scale-armour, or the Genoese
cross-bow. But then it had a great purpose to serve;
and one who discerns the salutary ends which the
Church as imperially organized accomplished, may ad-
mire anew the patience and the wisdom whose silent
grasp no power eludes, and which even man's wrath at
last must praise.
But now it is obvious that with this system of or-
ganization had grown up one of doctrine and of worship,
and had been developed spiritual tendencies, whose effects
were widely and dangerously evil; against which Chris-
tians had at length absolutely to rebel, to maintain or
Oration, by Dr. Storrs. 19
regain the gospel of Christ. And here it was that the
Scriptures met their determined antagonist.
The solemn setting apart of men to offices of perma-
ment prerogative and control, in a vast, ancient, and
dominating Hierarchy, almost inevitably induced the as-
sumption that the Church was in them, as Louis of France
declared himself “the State,” and that men must abide
in communion with them on peril of losing eternal life.
In their view, it had commission, this priestly Church,
with affirmative voice to declare and unfold, even to sup-
plement, what was taught in the Scriptures. It had
power, as well, to communicate grace, transmitted through
it by its Divine Head, on effectual sacraments: giving in
baptism the germinant principle of spiritual life; restoring
it in penance; nourishing and renewing it in other sacra-
ments, most of all in the Eucharist. It was in orderly
development of this system that the very body and blood
of the Lord were at last affirmed to be in the wafer—
the Infinite in the finite, the personal presence and glory
of the Redeemer in material particles; and that thence-
forth the chief vehicle of grace to the soul which received
it was held to be not the word of the Master, but this
figure of bread, over which thaumaturgic words had been
spoken, and behind whose accidents was the hidden splen-
dor and life of God's Son.
With this came naturally a form of worship pictorial
and spectacular, rather than instructive; an homage paid
to the hierarchies above; the increasing adoration of the
“Mother of God”; and all the forms of doctrine and
practice still presented by the modern representative of
this middle-age Christendom. The entire system, in its
gradual expansion to its ultimate surprising symmetry and
vigour, rises before one in the pages of history as plainly
as the chain of the Cordilleras on a recent ample topo-
graphical map. It corresponded with the vast politico-
religious organization in which it was formulated. It
seemed to supply the reason for that; and it wrought, with
and through it, with an energy seemingly inexhaustible.
20 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration.
Of course, by its nature, the entire system was pro-
foundly adverse to the popular reading of the Scriptures.
It was surely conscious of many things,-in the worship
of Saints, or of the Virgin, in the efficacy of sacraments,
the traditional functions of prelates or the Pontiff—for
which no warrant could be found in the Word, if that did
not distinctly contradict them, and foretell their mischiefs.
To allow men to search the Scriptures for themselves was
practically to suspend the function of the Hierarchy, as
the authorized expositor of the Divine teaching. All
divisions of opinion might then be apprehended. A man
might even come to feel that he had no further need of
a priest, as the mediator between Christ and his soul, but
could go himself, in sorrow for sin or in petition for favour,
to Him whose mind had touched his in the Gospel. It
could not, indeed, have seemed inconceivable that an
entire scheme of doctrine, based on the idea that faith in
the Lord is that which justifies, and that such faith has in
it the power of the life everlasting, might thus finally ap-
pear in the world. And the whole pontifical organization
would be in peril if such an exposition were given to the
argument of the Pauline epistles.
It must be observed, too, that what we hold—justly,
we think—the evil effects of a long withholding of the
Scriptures from the people, came to furnish fresh argu-
ment for it. The four-fold significance recognized in
those Scriptures could only be discerned by devout and
competent spirits. If then it had come to pass, as plainly
it had, that neither intellectual nor spiritual insight
was commonly to be found in religious assemblies—that
the people who bowed in adoration to images, less grace-
ful than the Greek and less august than the Roman,
who trusted in the wood of the Cross, who rang bells in
the night to frighten the demons from the air, and who
only felt the sanctity of an oath as it had been taken on
ancient relics and unauthenticated bones, that these could
scarcely be expected to feel the sublime pathos of the
gospels, or to follow the excursions of Paul's inspired
Oration, by Dr. Storrs. g 21
and rapid reason—all the more was it certain to those
in authority that it would be casting pearls before
swine, intoxicating weak and unprepared souls with
precious cordials, to freely open the Scriptures to all.
Undoubtedly often, to devout minds, it seemed a token
of reverence for these to keep them apart from ignoble
hands; while it seemed equally a tenderness to those
who might be seduced, through misconceiving the Word,
into dangerous error.
So it came to pass, in no flash of petulant arro-
gance, by no inexplicable frenzy of councils, but by a
logical moral progress, certain and governing, that the
early plan of putting the writings in which Christianity
was declared to the world into the hand of every reader,
for his guidance to the Master, or for his sweeter wis-
dom and grace, was suspended and antagonized by the
later plan of keeping all teaching in the hands of the
priesthood, and reserving to a language understood by
only the educated class the sacred books. Reverence for
these books had preserved them in the monasteries, with
effectual care. It had caused them to be often tran-
scribed by the monks, to be splendidly ornamented,
superbly bound, embossed and enriched with gold and
gems, till a copy was almost worth in commerce the
price of a castle. But it had hidden them from the
touch of the laity with as jealous a care; and the tend-
ency to that was as unreturning as the steady slip of
the stream to the sea. A distinct prohibition of the
Scriptures to the people was promulgated at Toulouse,
A. D. 1229. It had been a rule of the Greek Church
before. But particular decrees only uttered a rule which
lay back of all, and was inherent in the system of
thought from which they sprang. As that system
became perfected, its tone grew sharper and more impe-
rious. It watched its domains with a vigilance unsleep-
ing. And he who thereafter would place the Scriptures,
in a language familiar, before the people, must cross
swords with the power which had kings for its vassals,
22 TWycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration.
their armies for its troops, and upon the plates of whose
alleged supernal armour the fiercest chieftains had shiv-
ered their blades.
But now it is also to be observed that against this
tendency had been at least occasional resistance, by
many of the best among the people, and of the priest-
hood; and that this had been as manifest as anywhere
in that earlier England, which, after a frightful paralysis
of its powers, had come, at just the time of Wycliffe, to
its incipient resurrection. We have to trace this his-
tory, also, to get his work, in its impulse, its meaning,
and its fruitful effect, fully before us.
The movements toward a more spiritual faith which
at different times had appeared on the Continent—
represented in part by the Paulicians, by Claude of
Turin, by Peter de Bruys, by Arnold of Brescia, or,
more largely, by Waldo and his followers—these seem to
have made slight impression on the peoples in England.
Their relations with the Continent were not close; and
thought passed slowly, in those sluggish times, from one
state to another. But among the German peoples them-
selves, who had conquered Britain, there had been
developed at different times a practical tendency toward
freedom in religion, and especially toward a more per-
sonal and general acquaintance with the Scriptures.
Of course their history, after settling in England,
had been very largely one of strife. It startles us to
remember that more than one year out of two, in
the whole six centuries of their growing domination, had
been occupied in struggle: against the preceding inhab-
itants of the country, among themselves, or against the
roving tribes which had followed; while the breaking
in of the still pagan Danes, upon the state which was
painfully striving toward Christian order, immensely
retarded its moral progress. Yet the active and strenu-
ous spirit of the Saxons, after they had accepted the
Christianity which Gregory sent, by the Abbot Augustine
and his forty monks, had never ceased to work toward
Oration, by Dr. Storrs. 23
better and larger knowledge, and a more secure free-
dom. The name “Saxon" may not have come, as some
have derived it, from the short sword-axe, or “Seax,”
which they carried; but the weapon certainly well repre-
sented their self-asserting and resolute temper, to which
war was familiar, and which sought utility as the prime
good in instruments. There was nothing very fine or
ethereal about them. They were not distinguished for
brightness of fancy, or moral delicacy, or for unusual
spiritual insight. But they had a sense of personal right,
which was vital and strong, with a certain robust prac-
tical intelligence; while they readily received whatever
forms of foreign culture they could assimilate.
They had gained written codes, as one effect of their
new religion. They had gained a force from the world
at large, to expand and lift the insular spirit. Arch-
bishop Theodore, an Asiatic Greek from Tarsus, in the
seventh century brought to Canterbury an extraordi-
nary library, containing Greek authors as well as Latin.
He established important schools in the kingdom, and
himself taught arithmetic, astronomy, medicine, and
divinity. The African Abbot, Adrian, who accompanied
him, was of a like spirit; and in less than a century
from the landing of the monks, Caedmon of Whitby was
reciting to the Abbess Hilda and her scholars the first
English song—of Creation, of Judgment, and of what
lies between; Aldhelm, of Malmesbury, was inventing
the organ, and writing the earliest Latin verse; while
the eloquence and the sanctity of Cuthbert seemed to
open heaven to the eyes of those to whom he preached.
In the following century, Offa, the king, not only struck
coins and medals, and built an abbey and a palace, but
he framed laws to promote Christian morals, drew closer
the relations of England to the Continent, and corre-
sponded with Charlemagne on matters of commerce and
education.
Alfred, of the ninth century, by consent of all one of
the leading figures in history—not great in opportunity,
24 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration.
but great in mental and moral force—is the typical
Saxon. He had been upon the Continent, and had
there had experience of a higher civilization than existed
in England. He sought to assemble learned men at his
court, as Grimbald from St. Omer's, and Asser from St.
David's. He learned Latin himself, in the intervals of
a life crowded with care and thick with battles, that he
might open its treasures to others. He translated from
it Orosius's History, with additions of his own; Gregory's
Treatise on the Duty of Pastors; Boëthius, on the
Consolation of Philosophy; the Ecclesiastical History of
Bede, and parts of the writings of St. Augustine. He
personally translated parts of the Scripture, and was
engaged at his death on a Saxon Psalter. Bistorians
find a striking illustration of the range of his thought
in the fact that he sent ambassadors from England to
the ancient Christian churches in India. A clearer illus-
tration appears in the fact that he founded schools
at Winchester and Oxford—the latter of which has not
unreasonably been considered the germ of the later
University; that he sought a higher education for girls,
as well as for boys; and that he expressed the kingly
wish that all the free-born English youth should some
time read with correctness and ease the English Scrip-
tures. Athelstane, his grandson, was hardly behind him
in his desire to further learning, and promote moral
welfare; and he also pressed the translation of the
Scriptures into the common English speech. The “Dur-
ham Book,” of Latin gospels, with Saxon glosses inter-
lined, the most beautiful example of Saxon calligraphy,
is perhaps of his time.
In spite, therefore, of tides of battle ever rising and
slowly receding, a true progress had been realized in
England, in the direction of those attainments which
have given to the nation its subsequent fame. Men for
the time distinguished by their accomplishments began
to appear. The Abbot Benedict brought costly books
and works of art, on his return from each of his jour-
Oration, by Dr. Storrs. 25
meys to Rome. The Venerable Bede, in the eighth
century, found learning, teaching, and writing, as he
said, a constant delight. He learned Greek, as well
as Latin, with something of Hebrew, and quoted Plato
and Aristotle, as well as Seneca, Cicero, and Virgil.
He left forty-five books to attest his industry, on sci-
ence, philosophy, as well as theology; and is said to
have first introduced the use of the Christian era in his-
torical writing. He drew to himself six hundred schol-
ars; and he died, as we know, while engaged in trans-
lating the Gospel of John into the stubborn Saxon
tongue. Burke calls him “the Father of the English
learning;” and, though denying him genius, credits him
with “an incredible industry, and a generous thirst of
knowledge.”
Alcuin, who came later, the friend and instructor of
Charlemagne, had been educated at York, where the library
collected by Archbishop Egbert was already so rich that
he remembered it with delight and regret from his more
brilliant Southern home, and longed that “some of its
fruits might be placed in the Paradise of Tours.” Dun-
stan, of the tenth century, though of a fiery arrogance of
temper, supremely devoted to the Papacy, was also an
assiduous student, a designer and painter, a skilful musi-
cian, with taste in the arrangement of jewels and the illus-
tration of books, a judge even of embroidery, and fond of
rich architecture. The literary eminence of the Saxon
clergy was then acknowledged by other nations. The
schools, at York, and at Jarrow on the Tyne, were cele-
brated; and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, of the time of
Alfred, remains, with the exception of Ulphilas's transla-
tion, the most venerable monument of Teutonic prose.
The general moral progress of the nation, though not
rapid or signal, appeared thus secure. Industries were
multiplied; gardens and orchards began to replace the
forests, swamps, and pasture-lands; articles of taste came
to be frequent, musical instruments, cups of twisted glass,
or of gold or silver, curiously wrought, which were often
26 TWycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration.
exported. The walls of churches were hung not unfre-
quently with pictures and tapestries, and silver candelabra
were on the altars. The even-song of the monks at Ely
floats to us over the centuries, and the Danish Canute's
enjoyment of it has been commemorated in lovely lines by
a great English poet. Woman had relatively a high posi-
tion in the Saxon communities, and freedom was general.
Ringship had been born of battle; but the kings were
little more than elective war chiefs, and the national coun-
cil could depose them. Assemblies of freemen consulted
and decided on public questions. County courts, which
we have inherited, took cognizance of all cases, whether
temporal or spiritual. Slavery was limited in extent, and
the body of the people were proprietors or free labourers.
Those of lower ranks could rise to the higher, like the
great Earl Godwin. Towns and parishes were more nu-
merous than on the Continent. Allodial properties were
widely distributed; and the Witnagemote, or Assembly of
Wise Men, including king, clergy, nobles, and gentry, held
the government of the kingdom in its strong and liberal
hand.
In spite, therefore, of wide illiteracy, and of unrefined
manners, the Saxon people, at the time when Edward the
Confessor completed his work of fifteen years in building
Westminster Abbey, were comparatively self-governed,
energetic, and prosperous. They had liberty of access,
laymen as well as priests, to copies of the Scriptures, where
these existed. The Gospel and the Epistle were read in
English in the churches, and the sermon was so preached.
Other parts of the Scriptures were in their own tongue.
AElfric, in the tenth century, had given an epitome of the
Old and New Testaments, and had translated portions of
them, besides quoting in his homilies numerous texts.
The “Rushworth Gloss,” like the Durham, gave the Latin
of the Gospels, with a Saxon translation; and still another
translation of the same sacred records is known to have
preceded the Conquest. It seems nearly certain that if
the progress thus commenced had continued unhindered,
Oration, by Dr. Storrs. 27
long before the day of Wycliffe, the Bible, in the speech
of the people, would have been the possession and rich
inheritance of our rough, but robust, aspiring, and hopeful
English ancestors.
At this point, however, breaks in upon their history a
fracturing force, which certainly long retarded this prog-
ress, and which seemed for a time wholly to forbid the final
attainment. I refer, of course, to the Norman Conquest.
The difference between the Saxon and the Norman was
not one of blood, since both represented the Teutonic
stock; but it was fuller of meaning and of menace for that
very reason, because the Scandinavian stuff had taken in
the Normans a peculiar development, which made them at
once despise and hate their ancient kinsman. Their long
career as rovers of the seas had perfected in them the na-
tive fierceness from which the Saxons had been emerging
into a more domestic habit. Settling in France, in the
ninth century, and wresting lands and cities from its king,
these restless pirates—whom Charlemagne, even at the
height of his power, had seen and feared—entered into
alliance with the Southern civilization, and became its
chiefest Northern champions. Dropping their own reli-
gion and language, they adopted the religion, the lan-
guage, and the manners, which preceded them in France.
Its feudal system, in the utmost completeness, they joy-
fully accepted. Its rites of chivalry, which the Saxons had
tardily and partially adopted, were practised by them with
eager devotion, as well as with prodigal splendor and
pomp. They became the exulting, if not always the pa-
tient, adherents of the Papacy, whose far-ascending orders
of rank surpassed their elaborate feudal distinctions, whose
majestic ceremonial was more sumptuous and brilliant
than that of their tournaments. And a century and a half
after their first settlement in France, there was no province,
from the Channel to the Gulf, more alive than was theirs
with the spirit and forms of the peoples speaking the
Romance tongues. The martial fire burned as ever in their
veins; but their constitution was feudal, their language
28 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration.
French, the whole tone of their society had been caught
from the South.
Descendants of renowned and irresistible conquer-
ors, “the silver streak” interposed but slight barrier
between this people and the fertile farms and thriving
towns, every rumour of which re-excited their greed.
Their influence had been largely augmented in England
during the reign of Edward the Confessor. It came to
its terrific consummation when on Christmas-day, A. D.
1066, a few weeks after the victory of Hastings, William
of Normandy was crowned King of England, in that
Westminster Abbey whose vast extent, massive pillars,
and cruciform structure showed already the Norman
impress. His conquest was not fully completed till
some years after; but from that time the old order of
things was practically ended, and a new and dreadful
era began.
The destruction of properties in the kingdom was
enormous. The destruction of life, happiness, hope, not
only in battle, but in the fierce outrage and rapine
which broke as a fiery flood upon the land, is some-
thing which cannot be pictured in speech. It is not
wonderful that men fancied long afterward that fresh
traces of blood appeared supernaturally on the battle-
ground near Hastings, as if to show the writhing of the
land in its immense anguish. In the time of Stephen,
the Chronicle said, one might travel a day and not find
one man living in a town, nor any land under cultiva-
tion. “Men said openly that Christ and his Saints were
asleep.” The feudal system, in all its rigour, took the
place of the simpler Saxon institutions; and it was
reckoned, in the third generation after the Conquest,
that more than eleven hundred castles had already been
erected. The Saxon clergy, endeared to the people by
their general steadfastness for the popular cause, were
driven with violence from their places, to be suc-
ceeded by Norman monks. Wulfstan, of Worcester,
was, after a little, the only Bishop of English blood left
Oration, by Dr. Storrs. 29
in his place. The supremacy of the Pontiff, who had
sent to William his consecrated standard, and who had
followed his invasion with the first Papal legates in the
island, appeared finally exalted above all local Episcopal
rights; and the freedom of the Church seemed to have
fallen, with that of the State, in final ruin. Even vener-
ated Saxon saints were displaced from the calendar, as if
Heaven itself were a wholly Norman institution.
The language of the people was banished from the
Court, the councils, the public records, and the Northern
dialect of France took its place. The native English
were despised without measure, and despoiled without
mercy. Many fled across the sea, into the service of
foreign kings, or of the Greek Emperor. Becket—made
Chancellor, and Archbishop, under Henry Second—was
the first Englishman to rise to any distinguished office;
and during the intervening century it seemed as if the
earlier nation had been literally crushed, by the fierce
onset of overwhelming power, into a helpless and hope-
less subjection, from which there could be no release.
It could not but be long, under circumstances like
these, before the tendencies, active before, had a chance
to re-appear, seeking again a freer faith, and wider
acquaintance with the Scriptures. But these tendencies,
like those to freedom in the State, were radical and
perennial; and the stubborn struggle through which they
at last rose to supremacy makes the pages which record
it of interest to the world.
In spite of this tremendous overthrow, which had
fallen like a whirlwind full of thunder and flame on the
English people, and in spite of the organized military
oppression under which they long suffered, many things
remained, and after a time re-asserted their right. The
old language remained; and gradually, though slowly, it
crowded back the Norman dialect, while from that it
gained important additions. The old laws continued,
among the people, and the early local institutions. These
gradually attacked the fabricated strength of the feudal
* 30 TWycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration.
establishment; and every prince who would win popu-
larity found his readiest resource in ratifying the laws
of Edward the Confessor. The old life of the people
remained, unbroken by the desolating strokes it had
suffered, and with an unconquerable tenacity of purpose
waiting its time to conquer its conquerors.
Meantime, it grew evident that many things had come
with the Conquest, to expand, enrich, and liberalize this
life, and to make the nation ultimately nobler, in knowl-
edge and in hope. The monastic school of the Bec, in
Normandy, was famous throughout Europe, and the great
archbishops, Lanfranc and Anselm, who came thence to
Canterbury, established schools, quickened thought, and
fostered learning. A more uniform church-service was
established in the kingdom, making worship more attract-
ive with its statelier harmonies. Our very word “Bible,”
as describing the Scriptures, came with the Normans into
England. New learnings were absorbed from the now
nearer Continent. The civil and the canon law became
the subjects of careful study. Distinguished scholars ac-
quired a European fame: John of Salisbury, with William
of Malmesbury, in the twelfth century; Matthew Paris,
the historian, and sharp critic of Rome, in the thirteenth,
with Roger Bacon, greatest of mediaeval philosophers, and
Robert Grostète, Bishop of Lincoln, most distinguished of
prelates; Occam, the “invincible” and the “unique,” in
the fourteenth century, with Thomas Bradwardine, pro-
found in mathematics as well as in theology. Churches and
monasteries were built in great numbers: the cathedrals
of Canterbury, Durham, Rochester, Chichester, Norwich,
Winchester, Gloucester, and others. The Norman spirit
and manner of treatment gave from the first a new char-
acter to such buildings, which afterward flowered into
delightful exhibition in the pointed arches or the lovely
flowing window-tracery of later cathedrals, as Salisbury,
or Wells, or in the Westminster chapel of St. Stephen.
The Universities were organized at Oxford and Cam-
bridge, and attracted wide public attention. An immense
Oration, by Dr. Storrs. 31
enthusiasm for study prevailed among the young. In the
thirteenth century Oxford was second only to Paris in the
number of its students. Thirty thousand are said to have
been there at one time, to learn, as Hume says, “bad
Latin, and worse logic,” but to gain enlargement and
vigour of thought from even such imperfect studies; and
it was the logic of Aristotle which came there, through
Edmund Rich, afterward Archbishop. The arts of music
and pictorial illustration took a fresh impulse. The use of
paper, instead of parchment, multiplied manuscripts. The
first really English book, the travels of Sir John Mande-
ville, appeared in the middle of the fourteenth century;
and libraries then began to be gathered by private persons.
Better than all, the Norman and the Saxon elements, so
long exasperated into mutual hate, began to assimilate,
and to come into union, to form the ultimate English peo-
ple; and so the old spirit, which had survived Bede and
Alfred, and had outlived the Conquest, was ready again,
with larger training, ampler instruments, and a more com-
plete strength, to take up its interrupted work.
Already, in the reign of Henry Second, the Norman
had begun to cease to be conqueror, while the Saxon began
to rise from subjection. He “initiated,” it has been said,
“the rule of Law.” Early in the thirteenth century Magna
Charta was won, by the people as well as by barons and
clergy, in the interest of all; and distinctions of descent
thenceforth in large measure disappeared. Under Henry
Third was added the memor ble Charter of the Forest,
while the Great Charter was solemnly re-affirmed. How
frequently afterward it was so re-affirmed, every one knows:
by the weak king, needing popular support; by the strong
king, wanting money for wars. Edward Third re-affirmed
it fifteen or more times, in his single reign. Within two
centuries after the Conquest, A. D. 1265, Parliament in-
cluded citizens and burgesses, with nobles and prelates.
Its name was Norman, its substance English. In the fourth
year of Edward Third it was ordained that its sessions
should be annual; and it constantly insisted on conditions
32 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration.
precedent before making its grants, these conditions being
the enlarged and secured liberties of the realm. Under
the Edwards immense progress was thus made in the
law; and the Royal prerogative, in spite of the glamour
cast upon it by the later French victories, sensibly
declined.
The treatise of Glanville, the earliest probably on
English law, had been written before; and that of Brac-
ton had followed it, under Henry Third. The famous
treatise known as “Fleta,” of the reign of Edward First,
composed probably by order of the king; the tract of
Britton, in Norman French; the “Mirror of Justice,”
written perhaps a little later, and probably by a Saxon—
these show the progressive activity in legal discussion.
Year-books, containing authentic reports of adjudged
cases, preceded the reign of Edward Second. A great
number of fruitful new laws came into existence under
Edward. Third, and on points of capital importance.
The power of the people was more clearly recognized.
They had shown their prowess on Continental fields, and
the skilled, archers, to whose English muscle the Nor-
man arrow had given a swift and terrible weapon, had
won the day for belted knights at Crécy and at Poictiers.
Even the enfranchisement of the villain-class was stead-
ily advancing; and the near insurrection, headed by Wat
Tyler, only manifested in sudden and riotous fury the
spirit which had long preceded and impelled it.
The English language, now enriched from the French,
came again to its place, not among the people only, but at
the Court. In A. D. 1258, two centuries after the Conquest,
was first issued a Royal proclamation in English. The
Chancellor's speech was made in Parliament in the same
tongue, a century later, A. D. 1363. But, a year before, it
had been ordered that pleas in Court should be pleaded
and judged in English, though laws and records con-
tinued to be written in Latin or in French. This was at
once a sign and a stimulant of the revived national
spirit, which had come once more to animate the king-
Oration, by Dr. Störrs. 33
dom; and this had its ultimate menace toward the Pope,
as well as toward immediate secular oppressions.
The exactions of the Papacy in the thirteenth cent-
ury had been nearly intolerable, in spite of the fact that
Magna Charta had interposed its shining shield to pro-
tect in a measure the national Church. The Norman
work had been only too thoroughly done. The richest
benefices were held by foreigners. One half of the real
estate in the kingdom belonged to the Church. Vast
sums were annually sent from it, to pass out of sight
through the lavish treasury of Rome or Avignon. The
finances of the Crown were embarrassed thereby, while
the popular indignation grew vehement and wide. The
removal of the Papal throne into France, early in the
century, had shaken the English allegiance to it. The
long Schism of the West, which closed the century, in
which England and France favoured rival pontifical claim-
ants, struck a heavier blow at the popular regard for the
office itself. The drift of English legislation became there-
fore sharply and stubbornly adverse at least to the secular
claims of the Popé.
In the seventh year of Edward First, the statute of
Mortmain limited the acquisition of properties by the
Church. In the eighteenth year of Edward Third, this
was renewed and its execution more fully assured. In the
twenty-fifth year of the same signal reign the statute of
“Provisors” forbade Papal encroachment on the rights of
those who should present to church-offices; and two years
after, this was brought to a cutting edge by the sharp writ
of “Praemunire”—a barbarous name for a righteous pro-
cedure—which was further defined and reinforced in the
sixteenth year of Richard Second, by what the Pope not
unnaturally called “an execrable statute;” which put out
of the king's protection any who should procure at Rome
translations, processes, excommunications, bulls, or other
instruments, against the king and his dignity, forfeiting
their goods, attaching their persons, and subjecting them
to imprisonment at the king's pleasure. It was the flash
&TP
Wycliffe. e)
34 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration.
of a naked blade, warning the Pope to keep his hands
off from England; and this same writ of “Praemunire”
became a weapon of terrible effect, two centuries after, in
the furious grasp of Henry Eighth.
It is apparent, then, that we at last have reached a
point where many conditions were favourable in England
to the revival of the earlier movement toward freedom
in religion, and toward unhindered popular acquaintance
with the books of the Scripture. Yet it must not fail also
to be noticed that two forces were moving, distinctly, and
with violence, in the opposite direction, which were in
fact only deepened and made swifter by the general
obvious progress toward freedom. The one was the jeal-
ous, excited, passionate spirit of leading prelates, like
Wykeham or Courtenay, whose power was still subtle and
immense, and who were more strenuous for the spiritual
place and prerogative of the Church, as they felt the State
crowding upon their secular establishment. The other—
in some respects the more dangerous force—was the jeal-
ousy of land-owners, as the peasants around them were
seen to be rising toward larger liberties.
The repeated breaking out of the plague in England,
with its terrible ravages—cutting off, it is supposed, nearly
half the population—had unsettled all conditions of labour,
and men were lacking to do necessary work, while harvests
rotted on the ground, and cattle wandered at their will.
Successive statutes, beginning in A. D. 1349, had sought
to compel the service of labourers, and to regulate prices;
but they constantly failed, for forty years, and the fear and
wrath of proprietors were aroused against the turbulence
re-excited and extended by these very laws. Any influence
which promised additional impulse to the peasant-class
must therefore encounter their fierce resistance; while, as
I have said, the prelates, bred in the traditions of Rome,
were only more watchful against every threatened moral
assault because they had to yield and bend to the will of
Parliament concerning the enlargement of their temporal
estates.
Oration, by Dr. Storrs. 35
This was substantially the state of England in the
middle of the fourteenth century; and it is in the midst
of this excited, fermenting life—on the front of this old,
yet ever-new movement, toward freedom, nationality, and
a more intelligent popular faith—between these sharply
threatening perils—that the figure of John Wycliffe con-
fronts us. It is obvious, I think, that he appeared at a
critical time; that many forces had contributed to deter-
mine his spirit and aims, and to assign him his work in
the world; and that that work, although it came in the
fulness of time, was one of the most difficult, as well as
of the largest, yet entrusted to any man. I think it will
appear, too, that he was of singular fitness for it, and did
it with a supreme fidelity; and that the fruit of it never
has passed from English history. In some respects, cer-
tainly, his is one of the most impressive of all the figures
which his time presents. The Saxon and the Norman were
singularly combined in the great Englishman, at once
scholar and statesman, philosopher and ambassador, devout
recluse and determined reformer. And we, to-night, may
well be conscious of real and rich indebtedness to him.
The principal outward incidents of his life are suffi-
ciently familiar. He was born in Yorkshire, not far from
Richmond, famous for its noble castle, on an estate which
had belonged to his family from the time of the Conquest.
The earlier elements of the English population had con-
tinued in that district in larger numbers, and had clung
to the old traditions of the kingdom with greater te-
nacity, than in the midland and southern counties, though
Wycliffe's own family, to the end of its history, remained
attached with peculiar zeal to the Roman Church. It
seems, indeed, to have carefully covered the natural traces
of his inheritance in it, to whose fame alone it owes re-
membrance.
In the year 1324, according to the common statement,
or, more probably, a little earlier, the boy John was here
born. Of his instruction in childhood, we have no special
knowledge, as indeed he has told us almost nothing of his
36 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration.
life, at any point, being too great for egotism, and too
much engrossed with public work to perpetuate the inci-
dents of his personal history; but probably about the year
1335, he went to Oxford, and entered one of the five col-
leges then there existing—either Merton or, as seems more
probable, Balliol, with which he was certainly afterward
connected, and which had been founded by a family whose
estates lay near his home. He was at the University a
“Borealis,” or member of the northern “Nation,” which
had its own Proctor, and which represented whatever was
freest in the spirit of the place; and the whole University—
which was then simply a vast public school—constituted a
democratic cosmopolitan society, in which knowledge gave
leadership, and in which the scholars of different countries
were equally at home. Richard of Armagh, not yet Arch-
bishop, was in Oxford at the time, of whom Neander speaks
as “a forerunner of Wycliffe, by his freedom of thought;”
and Thomas Bradwardine had recently been there, who
anticipated Edwards in his doctrine of the will, and whose
vigour of character made all his speculation energetic and
impressive. How far the young student was in contact
with such teachers cannot be affirmed; but doubtless the
fine and fervid spirit which emanated from them affected
all minds as responsive as his, and all hearts as deeply
touched with a sense of religion.
He became, of course, familiar with Latin, as then used
among scholars, but not with Greek, which was not yet at
home in Oxford; and the liberal arts, grammar, rhetoric,
and logic—the “Trivium,”—arithmetic, astronomy, geome-
try, and music—the “Quadrivium,”—we know that he suc-
cessfully pursued. The physical and mathematical studies,
indeed, appear to have had for him quite as strong an
attraction as the logical and speculative. He passed from
them all to the study of Theology, including the inter-
pretation of the Old and New Testaments, as found in'
the Vulgate, the reading of the Fathers, and of the Scho-
lastic Doctors, with the study of the canon law. That he
studied also the civil law, then or afterward, is equally
Oration, by Dr. Storrs. 37
certain, with the history and the canonical law of his own
kingdom. And these were to bear large fruit in his life.
In such pursuits probably ten years were occupied, and
by A. D. 1345, or thereabouts—the year before Crécy, four
years after Petrarch had been crowned at the Capitol—he
was fitted for larger University-work, as a teacher and a
Master. It is not necessary to follow his course for the
twenty years afterward, which were years with him of
silent growth, in preparation for a service which he could
then have scarcely expected. After A. D. 1357 he was for
some time a fellow of Merton College; in A. D. 1361 he
was Master of Balliol; and the same year he was nomi-
mated by his college Rector of Fylingham, a Lincolnshire
parish, which allowed him to continue in connection with
Oxford. For a short time he was Warden of Canterbury.
Hall, appointed by the Archbishop, its founder, on account
of his excellencies of learning and of life, but soon re-
moved by the successor of the prelate; and in A. D. 1366
he first appeared upon the stage of national affairs, and
began to gather that broader brightness about his name
which was finally to become a shining and enduring splen-
dor. To understand his attitude and course, at that time
and after, we must recall their particular and controlling
public conditions.
In the year before, 1365, Urban Fifth had made claim
upon Edward for the payment of a thousand marks, as the
annual feudal tribute promised by John to Innocent Third
for the kingship of England, and also for payment of large
arrears due on such tribute. Edward, in whose reign it
had never been paid, referred this to Parliament; and that
body was assembled in the following May. Its prompt
and emphatic decision was, that such a tribute should not
be paid; that John had had no right to pledge it, and had
violated his oath of Coronation in the act; and that, if the
Pope should prosecute the claim, the whole power of the
kingdom should be set to resist him. This defiant decision
was sufficient for its purpose, and the claim was never
again presented. From that time on, England stood free
38 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration.
from any pretence of vassalage toward the Pope, and had
its path more clear than before to future freedoms.
It is probable that Wycliffe was a member of this Par-
liament, representing the clergy, or summoned by the king.
He was, at all events, so prominent an advocate of its de-
cision, that a champion of the Papacy made upon him a
vehement assault, in reply to which he gives the reasons
urged in Parliament, by temporal lords, against such a
tribute. From these he concludes that the treaty of John
had been invalid and immoral; and he so presents the
reasons for this as to show his profound sympathy with
them, if he had not himself suggested and shaped them.
He calls himself, at the outset of his tract, “an obedient
son of the Church of Rome;” and such, no doubt, he then
..felt himself to be. But the vivid spirit of nationality and
of liberty which appears in the tract, with the habit of
referring to permanent equities as properly controlling in
public affairs, was prophetic of much ; and the instinct of
the Papacy must already have felt in him its future effect-
ive and intrepid assailant. He was, at this time, you
observe, perhaps forty-five years of age, a distinguished
scholar, according to the best standard of the time, famous
as a philosopher, an influential churchman, prominently
connected with the leading University. Now that his
spirit was clearly declared, equally fearless, searching, and
sagacious, now that the expert and practised logician had
shown himself also skilled in affairs, it might justly be
expected that his work would widen, and his influence
become a large and beneficent national force.
Academical and royal distinctions soon came to him,
as he was made Doctor in the faculty of Theology, and,
perhaps, royal chaplain; and in A. D. 1374 he was appoint-
ed by the king a member of the commission sent to treat
with a Papal embassy, at the city of Bruges, on matters
of grave and long dispute. His name stands second on
this commission, following that of the Bishop of Bangor;
and the members were empowered to conclude a just com-
pact on the matters in question with the Papal nuncios.
Oration, by Dr. Storrs. 39
The commission was associated with a large and brilliant
civil embassy, at the head of which was the Prince's
brother, the Duke of Lancaster, with the Earl of Salisbury,
and the Bishop of London.
Then, probably for the first time, Wycliffe saw a foreign
city, and one which presented as striking a contrast to
anything in England as did perhaps any town on the
Continent. The busy, wealthy, populous Bruges was then
at the height of its middle-age fame: with the picturesque
building just erected, whose belfry-chimes still ring in the
Square, and are echoed in poetry, with twenty ministers of
foreign kingdoms having hotels within the walls, and with
companies of merchants there established from all parts of
Europe; while, at the time of Wycliffe's visit, were gath-
ered there also royal princes and nobles of France, with
prelates from Italy, Germany, and Spain. Wycliffe was
brought there into closer relations with John of Gaunt,
Duke of Lancaster, whose friendship was afterward im-
portant to him; and it well may be that a fresh impres-
sion of the lovely and austere majesty of the Gospel, and
of the simplicity of that earlier development of Christianity
in the world with which his studies had made him familiar,
came upon his spirit, while he saw, as in microcosmic view,
the ostentation and pride, the practical unbelief, and the
hardly veiled license, which were the abounding fruit in
Europe of undisputed Pontifical rule. One cannot but
think that many convictions, which were governing with
him in subsequent life, took emphasis if not origin from
his brief residence in the gay and luxurious Flemish town.
The general result of the labours of the commission
was not of importance. Some of its members were soon
promoted by the Pope, and it is not perhaps a violent
inference that they had been acting from the first in his
interest. Wycliffe certainly was not promoted, save as he
was lifted to fresh prominence and influence by the sharp
prelatical attacks made upon him; and this may warrant
us in presuming that he had been faithful to king and
realm, in the exciting scenes and service. In A. D. 1374
40 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration.
he was made by the king Rector of Lutterworth, with
which his name was ever after to be connected; and, as I
have said, the steadfast stuff of which he was made, his
ability, energy, and loyalty to freedom, were soon further
tested in public affairs.
In A. D. 1376 the Parliament, afterward known as “the
good Parliament,” was assembled, before which came the
complaints of the kingdom against the Papacy, and by
which these complaints were presented to the king. The
continued intrusion of foreign clergy into English church-
livings, the scandalous character of many who bought
these from Papal brokers, the decay of religion consequent
upon it, with the pecuniary exhaustion of the kingdom by
the sums drained from it to be spent in dissolute pleasures
abroad—these were some of the vehement complaints;
and the fact that in England was a Papal collector, gath-
ering tribute to be sent to the Pope, and claiming the
first-fruits of church-livings, was specially presented, with
sharp remonstrance. It is probable that Wycliffe was a
member of this Parliament, and that its complaints were
shaped by his hand. The very language in which they are
framed seems marked with his idiom, and the relation sug-
gested between moral disorder and the physical calamities
which troubled the realm, is exactly in his spirit.
In the following year, 1377, he attacked Garnier, the
Papal collector, with indignant intensity, and, passing be-
yond the subordinate agents, with profound moral earnest-
ness he challenged the system which made them possible.
He came thus at last into that personal grapple with the
Pontiff which might from the first have been foreseen:
maintaining that he can sin; that what he does is by no
means right because he does it; that he is bound to be
pre-eminent in following Christ, in humility, meekness,
and brotherly love; implying, plainly, that otherwise he
is no Pope at all. The crowning doctrine here appears
that Holy Scripture is for the Christian the rule and
standard of the truth, and that what conflicts with it has
no authority. He is steadily advancing on the path of
Oration, by Dr. Storrs. 41
the principles to which study, reflection, public service
have brought him, without looking back. He has won,
already, a high place in England, and he uses his power for
freedom and truth with an unreserved outlay of strength
which recalls the Saxon times and blood. It will evidently
not do to leave him alone. At this point, therefore, breaks
upon him the first onset of that Papal assault which was
never afterward to cease to pursue him till his books had
been prohibited, and his bones had been burned.
In February, A. D. 1377, he was summoned to appear
before the Convocation, obviously on account of the stand
Which he had taken against prelatical and Papal aggres-
sion. When the Convocation assembled at St. Paul's,
the Duke of Lancaster, and Percy, the Grand Marshal
of England, with armed retainers, appeared with him,
as friends and defenders; together with several personal
friends, and some theologians who had come as his advo-
cates. An altercation instantly arose, between the Marshal,
with the Duke, on the one hand, and the imperious Bishop
of London; the result of which was that Wycliffe was
withdrawn from the tribunal without having had occasion
to open his lips. Whatever purpose had been cherished
against him, for the time at least had utterly failed, and
he went out as free as before. Immediately, however, the
English Bishops, or some of them, collected propositions
affirmed to be his, forwarded them to Rome, and sought
the Papal interposition. Of the nineteen propositions so
presented, five referred to legal matters, as the rights of
property and inheritance; four concerned the right of rulers
to withdraw from the Church its temporal endowments, if
these should be abused; nine related to the power of
Church discipline, with its necessary limits; and the closing
one maintained that the Pontiff himself, being in error,
may be challenged by laymen, and overruled. The “power
of the keys,” according to this clear-sighted witness, is only
effective when used under the law of the Gospel; and no
man can really be excommunicated unless by himself—
unless, that is, he has given for it sufficient occasion. .
42 TWycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration.
On the basis of these articles Gregory Eleventh, in
May, A. D. 1377, issued five bulls against their author.
Three of them were addressed to the Archbishop, with the
Bishop of London, commanding them to ascertain if such
propositions had been in fact affirmed by Wycliffe, in
“a detestable insanity,” and if so, to imprison him until
further instructions; commanding them also to cite him
publicly, lest he should seek to escape by flight; and re-
quiring them to bring the obnoxious articles to the notice
of the king. Another bull was addressed to the king, in-
forming him of the commission, and requiring his aid; and
still another to the Chancellor and University of Oxford,
enjoining them, on pain of the loss of all their privileges,
to commit Wycliffe and his disciples to custody, and deliver
them to the authorized commission.
The death of Edward Third, with the accession of
Richard Second, which presently occurred, and the spirit
Opposed to the Papal court which appeared vividly in the
following Parliament, made it expedient to delay taking
action under these instruments; and it was not until the
end of the year, after Parliament was prorogued, that pro-
ceedings commenced. Meantime, Wycliffe had drawn up
an opinion, for the king and council, on the right of the
kingdom to restrain its treasure from being carried to
foreign parts, in defiance of Papal censure. With utmost
emphasis he, of course, affirms this right: on the several
grounds of the law of nature, the law of the Gospel, the
law of conscience; and it is not likely that this opinion
rendered any less fierce the hostility to him which was
already intense at Rome.
A week before Christmas, the bull addressed to the
University was sent to the Chancellor, with the demand
that he ascertain if Wycliffe had propounded the alleged
theses, and if so, to cite him to appear in London before
the commission. The marked difference between this
mandate and the sharper terms of the Papal bull shows a
doubt of the temper which might prevail in the University,
with a fear of probable popular sympathy with the accused.
Oration, by Dr. Storrs. 43
The heads of the University seem to have taken no action
whatever on the Papal bull, but to have so far responded
to the commission as to serve upon Wycliffe the required
citation. Early, therefore, in A. D. 1378, the vigorous and
undaunted theologian appeared before the Archbishop and
Bishop, and made written answer for the theses. But he
did not come in his own strength alone. He was now
recognized as the faithful representative of a wide English
feeling. The widow of the Black Prince, now Queen-
Mother, sent an officer to the commission, charging the
prelates to pronounce on him no sentence. The people
of London forced their way into Lambeth Chapel, and
showed their purpose to defend him. The result of the
proceeding bore, therefore, no proportion to its threatening
commencement; for, though he was forbidden to teach the
specified theses—on the ground that they would give
offence to the laity—he left the court, for the open air of
streets and fields, with his freedom unfettered, with his
prominence and power only increased, by the futile assault.
The successive attacks of those who hated him had given
him a distinction which he never seems to have sought
for himself.
At just this time began that long Western Schism,
in which Urban Sixth was acknowledged by England,
Clement Seventh by France; in which, subsequently, there
were three Popes at once, almost equally detestable, with
equal violence anathematizing each other; and which was
not closed till thirty years after Wycliffe's death. An
immense impression was made upon him by this event;
and from that time, not ceasing to be a diligent scholar, a
patriotic counsellor, a devout theologian, he more and
more came to the front as a radical and devoted Church
reformer. The thin, tall figure, the sharply-cut features,
the penetrating eye, the firm-set lips and flowing beard,
which his portraits present, the thoughtful, earnest, digni-
fied presence, of which all men took note, were thenceforth
to be found in the perilous van of the long English battle
for a liberated Church and a Scriptural faith.
44 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration.
In this supreme period of his life, a marked and even a
rapid progress is to be observed in his judgments of truth,
leading him toward, if not wholly to, the ultimate ground
of the Protestant Reformation. The Lutheran doctrine of
Justification by faith alone, he never reached; but his
mind detached itself rapidly and surely from many entan-
gling previous opinions; it sought for truth on every side,
with eager care and fruitful fervour; and as fast as he
reached any certain conclusion he flung the most strenuous
energy of his soul into the work of conveying it to others.
His time was short; his work was noble and prolific.
A skilful, acute, and practised logician, a realist in phi-
losophy, yet a theologian largely made by the heart, he
took Reason and Authority as the sources of all religious
knowledge: “Reason” representing the intuitive and in-
structed mind and conscience; “Authority” representing
the Divine Scripture. To the claim of the latter on human
submission he admits no limit. It is superior to all tradi-
tions and decrees; the fundamental charter and law of the
Church. It is a book for every man; to be interpreted by
the Christian for himself, with prayerfulness and humility,
with a reasonable regard for the general Christian judg-
ment of its contents, and especially for that of the great
Church-Fathers, but with an implicit personal reliance on
the present aid of the Holy Ghost to make evident its
meaning, as Christ had opened it to His disciples. He was
himself a profound and constant student of the Scriptures,
quoting from them freely, showing comparison of part with
part, and so saturating his mind with even their language
that the Biblical phrase clings to his pen when it is set in
freest motion. He sought always the spiritual sense, yet
for that very reason was attentive to minute particulars of
expression, and to the thought suggested by these in the
highest moods of feeling. He found the very life of his
spirit in the Word, and more and more, to the end of his
career, engaged his soul in the study and the love of what
he declares the most true, faultless, perfect, and holy Law
of God.
Oration, by Dr. Storrs. 45
In the doctrine derived by him from the Scriptures
he was substantially Augustinian, though of unfettered
thought, and differing at some points from the illustrious
Numidian. The Law of God is to him the basis and the
measure of all dominion, in the State and in the Church;
and in Redemption is the key to Creation. Salvation is of
grace alone, not merited by good works, and the Lord
Jesus Christ is its only Mediator. He is Divine in nature
and work, yet also the centre and head of Humanity, set
forth as such with manifold fulness; and the dignity of
man's nature, with the realness and the reach of his moral
responsibility, appears from the fact that a Being so august
has intervened to redeem him. Of the Virgin Mary the
utmost which he affirms, in later years, is that she was
probably sinless, but that it is folly to contend on the ques-
tion, since belief in her sinlessness is nowise essential to
salvation. Toward homage to images, and prayers to the
Saints, he became pronounced in his antagonism, discern-
ing the danger of idolatry to the image, and holding any
devotion to a Saint only of value as it may nourish piety
to the Lord. He did not indiscriminately recognize Saints
—denying vehemently the power of the Church to canon-
ize many concerning whose holiness she could not have
been certain. He held the doctrine of the Church Invis-
ible—the body of the Elect—in which the impure can have
no place, however distinguished in prelatical rank, they
belonging to the “Church of the Malignants; ” and in this
true Church the priesthood is common to believers, and
every priest set apart to the office has right to administer
all the sacraments. The celibacy of the clergy—though it
was his own rule—he indignantly denounced, when im-
posed upon others, as “unscriptural, hypocritical, and mor-
ally pernicious;” and if, as he conceives to be possible, all
church-officials should give themselves to evil ways, the
laity would compose the Church, and must displace and
judge their rulers.
Of only two sacraments does he treat, Baptism and the
Supper; and against the doctrine of transubstantiation
46 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration.
he flung his whole force, in reverberating assault. Till
A. D. 1378 he had received it, as traditionally taught. An
interval of questioning evidently followed. With all his
power, in utmost energy of speech and spirit, after A. D.
1381 he repels and denounces it: as contrary to God's
Word; contrary to the early tradition of the Church; as
pregnant with all evil effects; the most dangerous of her-
esies ever “smuggled into the Church by cunning hypo-
crites.” He held in substance, from that time, the Lutheran
doctrine of the eucharist: no local corporeal presence of
Christ in the consecrated wafer, but a spiritual presence, to
be spiritually discerned. Yet, though the glorified body is
in heaven, and is not re-created by any priest, or bruised
by the teeth of any recipient, there is a certain energy
from it in the elements, as there is a certain presence of
the soul in all parts of the body; and the believing com-
municant is the one for whom this has its efficacy. He
finds no warrant for any sacrament except in express
words of the Scripture; and the preaching of that is to
him a true sacrament.
Very briefly, and of course imperfectly stated, this is
substantially the doctrinal system held by Wycliffe, in his
mature and final thought; and when we recall his resolute
spirit, his fervent zeal, and sovereign courage, with his
deep sense of the calamities of the time, and his hope for
the final reformation of Christendom, we easily see how
inevitably he stood, by reason of it, toward the Papacy,
as an enemy, definite and unsparing; toward the Scrip-
tures, as counting no labour too great, and no sacrifice too
costly, for their widest distribution.
In his relation to the Papacy three stages are apparent.
Till A. D. 1378 he had recognized the primacy of the
Bishop of Rome, while holding him by no means infallible,
or possessed of plenary spiritual power, and sharply reject-
ing his right to intermeddle with State legislation. From
that time till A. D. 1381 he less and less esteemed the
Papacy, as having any Divine authority, and came to
think it desirable for the Church to dispense with both
Oration, by Dr. Storrs. 47
Popes, then clamouring for allegiance. And from A. D.
1381 to the day of his death, the Pope was to him the veri-
table anti-Christ; the pontifical claims were flatly blas-
phemous; the Papal office had been a device of the Adver-
sary of souls, and the homage paid to it was detestable
idolatry. No words of the Reformers of the sixteenth
century were ever more sweeping in severity toward the
Papacy than were the words of this churchman of Eng-
land, this eminent leader in its foremost University, five
hundred years since; and all men might be sure that if
ever a Pope should get opportunity, the sword or the flame
would have one swift victim
In connection with this assault on the Papacy he came
to conflict with the Mendicant Orders, to attack whom at
that time was to make the kingdom bristle with enemies.
He had had with them mainly pleasant relations till A. D.
1378, and had rather exempted them from the fiery cen-
sures which he even then visited on the secular clergy;
but from that time, especially after A.D. 1381, as his opposi-
tion to transubstantiation became more vehement, and his
temper toward the Pope took on its intensity, he opened a
combat with these Orders which only grew in its unsparing
energy till his death. The absolutism against which he
revolted had in them its ubiquitous messengers; and he
smote at them, as well as it, with sentences that cut like
the blows of a blade. It was a combat from which they
never fully recovered, and which their subsequent defend-
ers and apologists have never forgiven.
This was the necessary destructive side of his immense
and incessant activity, after his work had fully opened.
But the positive side, which gave to his efforts enduring
and upbuilding power, was in the new teaching of Scrip-
tural truth, and especially in that circulation of the Bible
to which his whole character, all the aims of his life, and
all his convictions, with a necessary force, inspired and
impelled him. It is by this that he rises to real pre-emi-
nence in his times; that he suddenly consummates, in a
supreme action, the long preceding tendencies of history;
48 TWycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration.
that he hurled at the vast religious imperialism then domi-
nating Europe the one weapon which it could not with-
stand; that he shot forth a force still felt in our age, and
which will not cease to extend itself in the world till the
history of that has reached its conclusion, amid the ulti-
mate prophesied brightness. It was his principal earthly
work; and it gives him his final and grand renown.
I have spoken already of his fine and large acquaintance
with the Scriptures, and of his profound spiritual sense of
their majestic and tender meaning. It was always ob-
served of him as a preacher that his discourse was rooted
in the Bible; that while others preached “chronicles of the
world, and stories from the battle of Troy,” he clung to the
Scripture, and derived from that his illuminating lessons.
“The highest service that man may attain to on earth,” he
says, “is to preach God's Word.” “O, marvellous power
of the Divine seed,” he says again, “which overpowers the
strong man armed, softens obdurate hearts, and changes
into Divine men those who were brutalized in sin, and
removed to an infinite distance from God.” He insisted
on simplicity, clearness, energy, in developing and apply-
ing the message of the Word; on devout feeling in the
ministry of it, since, “if the soul be not in tune with the
words, how can the words have power?” But ever it is
the Word itself which is to him “the Life-seed, begetting
regeneration and spiritual life;” and in all proclamation of
the Gospel the aim must be so to flash its light on the
spirit as to bend the will to its obedience.
Chaucer's picture of the good country priest, which has
often been conceived to portray Wycliffe, represents him as
diligent and benign, rich in holy thought and work, who
has caught the words of life from the Gospel. Whether or
not the poet thought of this special preacher, he has aptly
described him. He had seen the Lord; and the words
which he had heard from Divine lips were law and life to
his enthusiastic and resolute spirit. He would make them
the power of God to others. So he sent forth his itinerant
preachers, without shoes, in unbleached russet, to traverse
Oration, by Dr. Storrs. 49
the kingdom, and to make these words familiar in it.
Probably these went out from Oxford as early as A. D.
1378—many of them with no clerical ordination, “Evan-
gelical men,” colporteurs, we should say; with God's Law
for their theme, their manner of preaching plain and sim-
ple, their contact with the people constantly close. He
who sent them was anticipating Wesley, in the means
which he used to evangelize England. He was multiply-
ing his voice a hundred-fold, and planting his convictions,
with an instant success, in multitudes of minds.
But now, as the greatest of all instruments for this
supreme work, he would have God's Word itself translated
into the common tongue of the people, and reproduced in
manifold copies, till the peasant might have it, while the
rich should gain through it a rarer treasure than jewels of
price. This was not a mere measure of policy, for pro-
moting a cause. It was the fruit of a Christian instinct, as
deep in his soul as life itself. He had felt the inexpressible
power of the Scripture, to uplift and expand, to cheer and
inspire the human spirit. He had felt, as profoundly as
had Bernard, the overwhelming sense of the awfulness of
life in its relation to unseen eternities, and the supreme
ministry of the Gospel to this. It was thus an impulse
irresistible within him to make the message which had
come from the Most High accessible to all, till precept and
promise, prophecy and truth, should be to men a presence
as familiar as the sunshine in which they had their physi-
cal image. So he gave to his country the first English
Bible, to be multiplied only in manuscript copies, to be
read, perhaps, only by stealth, but to be thenceforth the
possession of England, and to put an influence into its
life, and into the life which has subsequently flowed from
it, across either hemisphere, which cannot be outlined in
any discourse, or measured in thought. It was not only
the greatest work attempted in that age, and in its effect
the most beneficent; it was one of the most fundamental
and momentous done in the world since the day when
Paul took up his illustrious mission to the Gentiles.
Wycliffe, 4
50 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration.
Of the parts of the Bible known to the Saxons, I have
previously spoken. It needs only to be added that the
“Ormulum,” so called, a paraphrase in verse of the Gospels
and Acts, had been made in the thirteenth century, which
seems, however, to have been confined to a single copy;
that in the fourteenth century two translations of the
Psalms had been made, and that these were followed, after
a time, by one of the Epistles of Paul. But up to A. D.
1360 the Psalter was the only book of the Bible rendered
into the common speech; and copies of this were certainly
very rare. Within the next quarter of a century there
came into the English language the entire Bible; and it
came, by the witness of both adversaries and friends,
through the impulse and the labour of the great “Reformer
before the Reformation.” How far he himself translated
its books is not wholly certain. That he did so largely,
is undisputed. A Harmony of the Gospels, first translated,
seems to have led the way to the rest. The Apocalypse,
with its incessant attraction for spirits like his, in times
like those, was probably among the first of the books to
engage his hand. Others followed: most of the New Test-
ament being rendered by himself, doubtless with partial
aid from friends, the Old Testament, probably, in good
part, by Nicholas Hereford, an intimate friend and co-
labourer with him. Hereford, however, seems to have been
suddenly arrested in the work, and the rest to have been
done by another, probably by Wycliffe.
Of course, all the translation had to be made from the
Latin of Jerome, the Hebrew and Greek being almost un-
known. It was, in other words, the version of a version,
and so exposed to peculiar imperfection. But it must be
remembered that Jerome had had early Greek manuscripts,
earlier than any known until recently to the scholars of
Europe, and that so in translating him Wycliffe stood at
but one remove from the originals, while his perfect ac-
quaintance with the Latin gave him ample opportunity
to make his translation energetic and full as an English
equivalent. He completed it probably as early, at the
Oration, by Dr. Storrs. 51
latest, as A. D. 1382; and copies of it were rapidly made,
by the hands of skilled and eager scribes. But Wycliffe
himself no doubt was aware that the work had been too
rapidly done for its highest value or best effect, and
planned the revision, at once commenced, which finally
appeared from the hand of John Purvey, in A. D. 1388, or
four years after the master's death. Of this, more than a
hundred and fifty manuscripts still remain, in whole or in
part; many written on vellum, with elaborate care, to be
the possession of churches, or of the wealthy, and not a
few bearing the marks of long use, and of the concealment
into which they were hurried in times of trouble. All these
were written, probably, within forty years after Wycliffe's
death; and if we remember what destructive search for
them was made in the day of persecution, how many went
across the sea, how many shrivelled in the fires of war,
how many were burned, with those who had read them,
in public squares, how many may yet wait to be discow-
ered, we shall see how extraordinary their number at first
must have been. Only a spirit intense and determined
could have driven so swiftly so many pens.
Of the effect of this translation on the English language
many have written. The judgment of Lechler is undoubt-
edly just, that “it marks an epoch in the development of
the English language, almost as much as Luther's trans-
lation does in the history of the German tongue. The
Luther Bible opens the period of the new High German.
Wycliffe's Bible stands at the head of the Middle English.”
The most recent historian of the English people speaks of
him as the “Father of our later English prose.” Forms
of expression still familiar in our version come directly
from his : as the beam and the mote, the trampling of
swine and the rending of dogs, the Comforter for the
Paraclete, the Saxon exclamation “God forbid!” Mr.
Marsh may state the matter too strongly when he calls the
accomplished and diligent Tyndale “merely a full-grown
Wycliffe; ” adding that he “not only retains the general
grammatical structure of the older version, but most of its
52 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration.
felicitous verbal combinations, and, what is more remark-
able, he preserves even the rhythmic flow of its periods.”
It may be said in reply, as it has been, that much of what
is common to the versions came into both out of the Vul-
gate, by which one was determined, the other influenced.
Still it is true that what Mr. Marsh elsewhere calls “the
sacred and religious dialect" which has continued the
language of devotion and of Scriptural translation to the
present day, was first established in England by the
Wycliffe version; and that what Mr. Froude has charac-
terized as the peculiar genius, of mingled tenderness and
majesty, of Saxon simplicity and preternatural grandeur,
which breathes through the latest translation, had its ex-
ample, and partly its source, in the earliest. Tyndale,
Coverdale, Rogers, Cranmer, the Geneva translators, King
James's revisers, have all contributed something to the
work, but they only heighten, without obscuring, its early
lustre; and the final revision for which we look, with all
the aids which the most untiring scholarship has gathered,
must still abide, in its vocabulary, and in much of what-
ever charm it may possess through noble and harmonious
forms of verbal combination, on the primitive foundations
of five hundred years since.
How vast the impression produced by the version which
thus burst into use, not on language only, but on life, in
the whole sphere of moral, social, spiritual, even political
experience, who shall declarel To the England of his
time, confused, darkened, with dim outlook over this world
or the next, the Lutterworth Rector brought the superla-
tive educational force. He opened before it, in the Bible,
long avenues of history. He made it familiar with the
most enchanting and quickening sketches of personal char-
acter ever pencilled. He carried it to distant lands and
peoples, further than crusaders had gone with Richard,
further than Alfred's messengers had wandered. It saw
again the “city of palms” in sudden ruin, and heard the
echoes of cymbal and shawm from the earliest temple.
The grandest poetry became its possession; the sovereign
Oration, by Dr. Storrs. 53
law, on which the blaze of Sinai shone, or which glowed
with serener light of divinity from the Mount of Beatitudes.
Inspired minds came out of the past—Moses, David, Isaiah,
John, the man of Idumea, the man of Tarsus—to teach
by this version the long-desiring English mind. It gave
peasants the privilege of those who had heard Elijah's voice
in the ivory palaces, of those who had seen the heaven
opened by the river of Chebar, of those who had gathered
before the “temples made with hands” which crowned the
Acropolis. They looked into the faces of apostles and
martyrs, of seers and kings, and walked with Abraham in
the morning of time.
They stood face to face, amid these pages, with One
higher than all; and the kingliest life ever lived on the
earth became near and supreme to the souls which had
known no temper in rank save that of disdain, no touch
of power which did not oppress. Not only again, in lucid
column, the pillar of fire marshalled God's hosts. Not only
again were waters divided, and fountains made to gush
from rocks. Angelic songs were heard once more, above
the darkened earthly hills. Again, as aforetime, the Lord
of Glory walked as a brother from Nazareth and from
Bethany, strewing miracles in his path, yet leading the
timid to the mount which burned with peaceful splendor,
showing the penitent his cross, walking with mourners to
the tomb. From the paradise of the past to the paradise
above, the vast vision stretched; and gates of pearl were
brightly opened above the near and murky skies. The
thoughts of men were carried up on the thoughts of God,
then first articulate to them. The lowly English roof was
lifted, to take in heights beyond the stars. Creation,
Providence, Redemption, appeared, harmonious with each
other, and luminous with eternal wisdom; a light streamed
forward on the history of the world, a brighter light on
the vast and immortal experience of the soul; the bands
of darkness broke apart, and the universe was effulgent
with the lustre of Christ |
Of course this influence was not all felt by imany minds;
54 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration.
perhaps not in its fulness by any. But it was thenceforth
at home in England; at home, to stay. It smote with
irresistible energy on the rings and fetters of Pontifical
rule. It contributed a force of expansion and uplift to
every soul on which its quickening blessing fell. It be-
came an instrument of popular liberty, as well as a means
of elevation and grace to personal souls. There was the
Bnglish Renaissance | Leighton, and Owen, and Jeremy
Taylor, became possible afterward; Bacon and Hooker,
Shakspeare and Milton, Dryden and Wordsworth, and
Robert Burns. The world of letters had found a lan-
guage for the majestic periods of Burke, for Addison's or
Macaulay's prose, for Gibbon's sentences, moving as with
the tread of an imperial triumph. The world of life had
received to itself a transfiguring energy. Celestial forces
mingled thenceforth, more vitally, widely, with human
thought; and the indestructible holy influence, though
often interrupted, never ceased, till it came to its final
inevitable fruition in the perfect liberty of the Scriptures
in England.
The subsequent months of Wycliffe's life were like the
stormy afternoon, whose turbulence ceases, whose glooms
are scattered, in the sunset's golden tranquillity. An eccle-
siastical assembly at London—called by him “the Earth-
Quake Council,” because it was shaken by a tremble of the
planet—condemned his doctrines, but left him untouched,
apparently because of the spirit of the Commons. Oxford
repelled or evaded the attacks repeated upon him, but at
last yielded to a royal mandate, and his long connection
with it was closed. In November, A. D. 1382, he again
defended his doctrine before the Provincial Synod assem-
bled in Oxford, and again escaped personal senterfce or
assault. The weight of his character in the country was
too great, his following was too large, to be challenged
without danger. A vigorous memorial addressed to Par-
liament, against the English crusade for Urban, was one
of his last public papers, though many brief tracts were
written and distributed to the end of his life, and his ser-
Oration, by Dr. Storrs. 55
mons went forth as leaves on the wind. Three hundred of
them still remain. He expected martyrdom, and others as
surely expected it for him. But he was of that iron temper
which fire hardens into steel. His courage mounted with
occasion; and he found it as true in his own time as it ever
had been, “the nearer the sword, the nearer to God.” In
point of fact, he was never subjected to blade or brand.
He wrought in patience at his Rectory, making it a centre
of impulse to England. He stood to his convictions,
whether the Pope cited him or not, though even the pow-
erful John of Gaunt fell from his side, till a stroke of paral-
ysis a second time smote him, as he was engaged in Divine
offices, on the day of the Holy Innocents, at the close of
the year 1384; and on the final day of that year, as reck-
oned by us, he passed out of earthly struggle and care,
and entered his immortal rest.
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:—I would not exaggerate
anything in this man, but I am sure we must feel that it is
with one of the heroical persons, making nations greater
and histories splendid, that we have walked for a little this
evening. Of course by his translation of the Scriptures he
stands in most obvious relation to us. But the brightness
of his fame in this connection may have concealed from
the common thought the various and pre-eminent ability
of the man, the large place which he filled in his time, the
breadth and energy of his manifold influence. He does
not loom into large proportions because we see him
through morning mists. The more closely we study him,
from different sides, the more surely will he win our ad-
miring honour.
It is not often that a man without note, except among
Scholars, steps forward suddenly to a principal place in
public counsel. He breaks into sight, amid the turmoil of
his time, as a pre-ordained leader, simply pushed to the
front by an imperious impulse of nature. It is not often
that a man addicted to subtle and large philosophical spec-
ulation proves practical and acute in the sphere of affairs.
56 TWycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration.
He was recognized at first among scholastic philosophers,
yet none surpassed him in political discussion, for force of
statement, for grasp of principles, for sagacity or for
daring. It is not often that one trained from childhood to
familiar use of unclassical Latin becomes an attractive or
a competent writer in a different tongue. He created an
English style, rugged, idiomatic, whose sentences crash on
the ear like grape-shot, whose words are half-battles, which
has an occasional subtile charm, in the fine beauty of
phrase and rhythm.
Blameless, reserved, ascetic in life, he was humorous,
too, with jests that were arguments, and with a severe,
though a beneficent, sarcasm: as when it was said that the
Scripture does not recognize friars; “but it does,” was his
answer, “in this text, “I know you not l’” He was radical
in his views, in Church and State, while a revered leader
in a great University. Of knightly blood, and bred among
students, till his alleged errors were attributed by his ene-
mies to his subtlety of mind and inordinate learning, he
judged the plain people more correctly than themselves;
he interpreted the prophecy of their vague aspiration, and
was not afraid of the final effect of even their wantonness.
He had a deep sense of human sinfulness; but a nobler
eulogy on human nature than ever was spoken was that
wrought into action in his endeavour to make common to
men the thoughts of God. The rector of a parish-church,
he organized a mission which moulded the moral life of
the kingdom, till every second man was a Lollard. In the
solitude of his study, he dared to question the faith of ages,
to plant himself on spiritual certainties, and to balance
his mind, in the tranquillity of reason, against the whole
shock of church-authority. Apparently neither seeking
nor shrinking from contest, he smote the Pope with tremen-
dous anathemas, at a time when heresy was more odious
than treason, and when reverence for the Pontiff was the
religion of Christendom. With instinctive prescience he
saw the immense opportunity of the time; and living in
an age when prelates were humbled, and armies were
Oration, by Dr. Storrs. 57
awed, before the impalpable power of Rome, without hel-
met or mitre he stood invincible for pure freedom of soul.
He was equally great in intellectual force, and in the
more vital and sovereign energy of character and will.
His whole personality went into his work, with an utter
consecration. It was this which made him so momentous
a force in the great discussion and stir of his time. It was
this which set him in living fellowship with great souls
of the past. It was not Bradwardine, or Grostěte, alone,
whom he represented. The freedom-loving archbishops of
England had in him an unprelatical successor. Augustine,
Bernard, Thomas Aquinas, Peter Lombard, their thought
he had mastered, and wherever their spirit had been most
royal he also had felt it. Even Dominic and Francis had
given to him of the fire of their souls. The Saxon Church
found in this priest of Norman descent the sympathizing
champion of its long-struggling and unsatisfied zeal. So
his life had the roots, and his influence took the reach,
which transcend the limitations of individual force, which
belong to essential moral powers, successively imperson-
ated, never destroyed, and at home in all ages.
The years which followed him in his own country were
years of darkness, almost of death, to the cause with which
he identified his life. Almost singly, for a time, he had
held antagonist forces at bay. With the withdrawal of his
grand personality, the powers which he had arrested for
the time gained volume and velocity, while they learned a
new cruelty both from previous fear and from later success.
His followers were scattered, and multitudes of them were
ruthlessly flung to the flood or the flame. In the Convoca-
tion of A. D. 1408, it was forbidden to translate the Script-
ures or to read any version of them composed in his time.
After the Council of Constance, by which all his writings
were condemned, his bones were burned, and their very
ashes strewed on the stream, that Avon might carry them
to Severn, and Severn to the sea; but it was, as his disci-
ples said, that the World might be his sepulchre, and
Christendom his convert. There came a time, even in
§58 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration.
England, when the fatal laws against his adherents fell
dead in their places, and when the almost anarchic frenzy
which attended the long wars of the Roses gave way to a
peace in which liberty thrived. That was the time for
which his quickening thought had waited; and having
brooded silent in the air it then burst into voice, as if
touching a thousand souls at once. Still earlier on the
Continent, in Bohemia, and in Italy, had been felt his
vast impulse. John Huss, Jerome of Prague, Savonarola,
repeated the onset of his fearless spirit on the system
which, like him, they fought to the death, with their differ-
ing powers, with their equal consecration; and no one of
all died in vain.
In a copy of the Missal containing the ancient Hussite
Liturgy, in the library of the “Clementinum ” at Prague,
richly illuminated by loving hands, Wycliffe is pictured at
the top, kindling a spark; Huss, below him, blowing it to
a flame; Luther, still lower, waving on high the lighted
torch. It is a true picture of that succession in which
others followed, with brightening lustre, this “Morning
Star of the Reformation,” till the sky was glowing, through
all its arch, with the radiance of the up-springing light!
Out of that Reformation issued the new prophetic age
whose ample brightness is around us. It lifted England to
its great place in Europe. It wrenched powerful states
from the Papal control. It gave a wholly new freedom to
spirit and thought. It filled this land with its Protestant
colonies. It opens to us opportunity and hope. It is on
the work accomplished by Wycliffe, and by those who fol-
lowed, that our liberties have been builded. They are not
accidental. They have not been based on diplomacies, or
on battles, however these may have sometimes confirmed
them. They have not been framed, in their solid strength,
by the theories of philosophers, or the inventive devices of
statesmen. They are founded on the Bible, made common
to all. They have been wrought to their vast, enduring,
symmetrical proportions—more lovely than of palaces,
statelier than cathedrals—by their wisdom and patience
Oration, by Dr. Storrs. 59
who had learned from the Bible that human power has no
‘authority over the conscience; that man, through Christ,
has inheritance in God; and that, by reason of his immor-
tality, he has a right to be helped, and not hindered, by
the Government which is the organ of society. If the
England of Victoria is different from that of Richard Sec-
ond, if the present Archbishop of Canterbury is a holy
apostle by the side of Courtenay or Arundel, if the story
of what the kingdom then was appears to men now a
ghastly dream—it is because the Bible was made, through
toil, and strife, and agony of blood, the common possession
of the people who dwelt “on the sides of the North.”
Thank God! that the Book, which at Oxford and Lut-
terworth was first transferred, in its whole extent, to the
English tongue, which this Society has so widely distrib-
uted, and for whose final revised translation we now are
looking, has been, is now, and shall be henceforth, the
American Inheritance: expounded from the pulpit, taught
in the household, at home in the school. It is not ours by
our own effort, but by this struggle of many generations.
It is not ours for our own time alone, but for the centuries
which shall follow. The half-millennium which has passed
since Wycliffe, the millennium since Alfred founded his
“Dooms” on its Commandments, have not wasted its
force. With a Divine energy it works to-day, on every
hand, for grace and greatness. No future age will cease
to need its law, and truth, and inspiration.
To us is given the humbler work of making it general
and permanent in the land, as others for us have made it
free. In the measure of our indebtedness to them, are we
responsible for this future. Let us not be unmindful of
the great obligation l Let us rival, at least, their zeal for
freedom, their devotion to truth, if we may not rival that
invincible courage which shrank not from prisons, and was
friendly with Death: that these our years of noisy whirl
may have in them still the moral forces which gave to
theirs majestic renown; that the frame of free govern-
ment, and of spiritual worship, builded on their immortal
60 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration.
foundations, may be worthy the grand and costly life which
cemented its base; that the latest age of American History
still may repeat those words of Wycliffe, written amid the
heavy glooms which now are scattered, and in the front
of menacing perils which now are not: “I am assured
that the Truth of the Gospel may, indeed, for a time, be
cast down in particular places, and may, for a while, abide
in silence, in consequence of the threats of Antichrist; but
extinguished it never can be. For the Truth itself has
said, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words
shall never pass!”
3dfiress, bu (Jortlanfit ºarker, 3:30.
MR. PRESIDENT:—I am assigned the duty of express-
ing the voice of this assembly respecting the address to
which we have just listened, and I move you, “That
the thanks of the American Bible Society and of this
audience be presented to the Rev. Dr. Storrs, for his
learned, masterly, and eloquent address; and that he be
requested to furnish a copy for publication.”
In view of the eloquent address to which we have
listened, I might well stop here; but I am announced,
and have been requested to follow this resolution with
some remarks.
John Wycliffe was the Martin Luther of England; as
great a man, I think—a wiser, perhaps more learned, and
one equally persistent and heroic. Both braved Papal
power. Both attacked and defied the corruptions and
tyranny of the church. Both took their stand upon the
Bible as the only basis of religious belief. Both recog-
nized private judgment as not only a right, but a duty
and a necessity. Both, in a word, were Protestant; and
of the two, until I heard the words of the speaker this
evening, I was ready to say Wycliffe was the more Prot-
estant and the more worthy of distinction, in that he
preceded Luther by a hundred years, and in that he
could only circulate the Scriptures in manuscript, and
yet was the pioneer in the use of that great Protestant
weapon, the open Bible. I believe that this act, the giv-
ing the Bible to laymen, the making that open to all,
which, theretofore, if open at all, had been so only to
the ministers of the church, was the germ of the peculiar
62 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration.
liberty, civilization, and progress which England and
America most enjoy and illustrate. And therefore, I claim
for the name of John Wycliffe a veneration equal at
least to that which should belong to any other name in
any period of English or American history.
If men would know the meaning of the text, “The
truth shall make you free,” and of that other, “If the
truth then shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed,”
let them look at these two great nations; let them realize
the difference between their freedom and that of those
where the Bible has not been a fully open book.
The struggle for that freedom began with the contest
which Wycliffe inaugurated. For years that struggle
continued, until at last government and people united,
and an “open Bible” became the law of England. Then,
just then, did the germ sprout. Then is the first recog-
nizable impetus towards English greatness. Increased
and strengthened with time, it was given to the genera-
tion which settled America. Bible freedom—that freedom
which combines reverence and duty to God with the
assertion of the rights and the brotherhood of man—was
the freedom which the earliest settlers brought hither, and
for which those whom they left behind cherished and
struggled. Producing, naturally, the grandest character,
it pervaded succeeding generations, following for the most
part the same course of thought and practice, and from
which, from time to time, successive colonies came. The
England of to-day is the England first fairly developed
in the reigns of Elizabeth and James, and which has since
only been modified, never fully changed. The America
of to-day is great and worthy just in proportion as it
adheres to the principles of its originators.
The great feature of the period during which occurred
the settlement of America, especially during that rang-
ing between the middle of the reign of Elizabeth and
the meeting of the Long Parliament, was the supremacy
attained by the Bible. Says the eloquent historian of the
English people, “England became the people of a book,
Address, by Cortlandt Parker, Esq. 63
and that book was the Bible. It was as yet the one
English book which was familiar to every Englishman;
it was read in churches and read at home, and every-
where its words, as they fell on ears which custom had
not deadened to their force and beauty, kindled a striking
enthusiasm.” “It was wonderful to see,” says an older
writer, “with what joy the book of God was received, not
only among the learned sort but generally all England
over, among all the vulgar and common people, and with
what greediness the book of God was read, and what
resort to places where the reading of it was. Everybody
that could, bought the book or busily read it, or got
others to read it to them if they could not read them-
Selves.” “The effect of the book On the character of the
people at large,” continues Mr. Green, “was simply
amazing; the whole temper of the nation was changed.
A new conception of life and of man superseded the old.
A new moral and religious impulse spread through every
class. Literature reflected the general tendency of the
times.” “Theology rules there,” said Grotius. “The
whole nation became in fact a church.”
Out of all this, and under the action of many wonder-
ful changes and providences, upon which we can look
back now and plainly see that the hand of the Almighty
directed; with bluff King Harry fighting with the Pope
and appealing to the Word against him, his very self-will
and sensuality thus giving aid to the triumph of the open
Bible; with lovely Edward piously giving himself up to the
completion of the Reformation; with Mary and Philip fanat-
ically persecuting and lighting the fires of Smithfield and
Oxford; with Elizabeth in her turn contending with Spain,
and through the aid of Providence, seeing the great hostile
Armada perish—out of all this, I say, was evolved the
Puritan; not the grim precisian, morose, ascetic, penuri-
ous, canting, and hypocritical, which that word ordinarily
calls up and describes, and which in later years too often
claimed the title; but the true and original Puritan, who
was not necessarily or at first even a separatist, but
64 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration.
adhered to the church and its ministers, and sought
honestly to reform, not to destroy. “It was a name,”
says Fuller, “used to stigmatize those who endeavoured
in their devotions to accompany the minister with a pure
heart, and who were remarkably holy in their conversa-
tion.” Greatest among this class was the new conception
of social equality. Their common call, their brotherhood
in Christ, annihilated in the mind of the Puritans that
overpowering sense of Social distinctions which character-
ized a preceding age. The meanest peasant felt himself
ennobled as a child of God. The proudest noble recog-
nized a spiritual equality in the poorest saint. Of one
of the representative men it is written: “He had a loving
and sweet courtesy to the poorest; he never disdained the
meanest nor flattered the greatest.”
The gardener seeking successfully to propagate a noble
plant, chooses the best stock at its healthiest prime, and
then selecting the most promising bud, fullest of sap and
vitality, he severs it, and carefully carrying and nursing
it, in due time grafts it on some other hardy stock, assured
that it will permeate and renew it. And so the Divine
Gardener and Creator selected the exact moment when
the open Bible had done its noblest work, developed and
built up the purest and holiest character, and then per-
mitting wrongs and conditions likely to effect that object,
he directed an emigration, a conveying of the best of
England to the distant wilderness, there to grow into a
nation, like the other yet even more progressive; of a
freedom similar though perhaps more self-asserting—likely
to produce a type of men with more active energy than
that of those who remained; a nation which, daughter
of England not only, but a child of England's special
freedom—the freedom of the open Bible—would take its
place beside her as a bulwark of tolerant Christianity, a
dispenser through all ages of the blessings to mankind
which naturally spring therefrom. No thoughtful man
can fail to note the difference between the motives
which generally brought the first settlers to America and
Address, by Cortlandt Parker, Esq. 65
those which attracted other emigrations. It was lust of
gold which led the Spanish to Mexico and Peru and
Cuba, though mingled with the stern missionary martyr
spirit which distinguished Jesuit self-sacrifice. It was
lust of gold which in our day settled California and
Australia. It was lust of wealth and power which made
Great Britain mistress of the Indies. But with those
who from 1610 to 1700, when large emigration well-nigh
ceased, defied the storms and sought America, whence-
soever they came, and with scarce an exception, whether
from Holland, Sweden, Denmark, or England, the motive
of expatriation was the full enjoyment of Bible freedom
—of the right, that is, to believe and act upon their
belief of what it teaches—to enjoy the freedom of which
the Bible tells and which it prompts—a freedom which
establishes social equality among all men, combined with
and because of subjection to the law of God; a freedom
which implies law, self-restraint, love, and regard of one's
neighbour, mutual respect among all citizens; a freedom
which prompts activity, self-improvement, progress; a
freedom different in character from that which consists
with Atheism, Theism, or irreligion, precisely in that point
which has made these two nations so progressive—to wit,
that, according to its doctrines, man is intrinsically so
capable of elevation that it is his duty ever to seek it.
I call it “the freedom of the open Bible,” in which phrase
are two great doctrines: first, that it is not, as with many,
merely a book, however to be admired and comparatively
regarded, but the Bible—authoritative, true, supreme;
next, that it is to be open—open to all, not to be kept
for sacerdotal or other exposition merely—not to be fol-
lowed in the way of some rather than of others, but for
each human being to follow in his own way, according
to private judgment, with such wisdom as he can acquire
and on his own responsibility. Worshipful reverence for
the Book, combined with toleration towards all who con-
scientiously follow it, whatever their differences, and
with pitiful regard to such as conscientiously and respect-
Wycliffe. 5
66 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration.
fully impugn it;-this is the foundation of the freedom
which has done such great things for England and
America, and through them, for the world.
Honour then, and grateful memory and reverence for
him who first opened to England the Bible, translated it
into his native tongue, and started its circulation among
the “plain people.” Honour next to him, to Tyndale, and
Coverdale, and Cranmer, and all the worthies who with
him or after him completed the opening which he began.
Honour to English law and to English Protestantism, and
let me add, notably among its promoters, to the Church,
the great bulwark of Protestantism whose liturgy forces
on eye and voice and ear continuously Psalter and chapter
on every occasion of public worship, and thus insures that
this book of freedom should not only be open but be
known. Honour to this great Society and its parent over
the sea, scattering their millions of the holy volume, trans-
lated in every tongue, providing thus for the dissemina-
tion throughout the earth of Bible freedom. “Education,”
said Burke, “is the cheap defence of nations.” He would
have added, had his theme permitted, “Bible education
is the only secure basis for freedom, civilization, and
progress.”
Address, by 3&moch 32. 35 ancher, 3:3.33.
IT would be difficult to express the deep sense of grati-
fication experienced during the delivery of the eloquent
address to which we have listened.
Rich and golden have been the words of the distin-
guished orator; and I rise to second the motion for the
publication of the Address, so well proposed by Mr. Parker, .
one of our Vice-Presidents.
The inquiry has been sufficiently answered, why we, in
the last quarter of the nineteenth century, amid the blaze
of our civilization, when, in the tongues of the peoples,
the Bible is printed, circulated, and read in more than
two hundred languages and dialects, should commemorate
the achievement of that first English translation from the
Vulgate of St. Jerome. We celebrate the natal day of
that translation; for Wycliffe was the chief pioneer in
that group of worthies who have given to us our English
Bible—the primary hero taking the lead. We owe to him
an infinite debt of gratitude. He scattered the seeds of a
golden harvest that after generations have reaped. His
antique Saxon diction was the speech of the common peo-
ple, and his rectory at Lutterworth was the centre of an
evangelical movement to preach the gospel to them. With
amazing industry and labour he completed his great work
of translating the Scriptures; and we go back to that far-
off period of English history to mark the rise of a new
era in the diffusion of religious knowledge. Again “the
poor had the gospel preached to them; ” and the way
was being prepared for the great Reformation to come.
Just as in the harvest-time we sing of the buds and
blossoms of spring, of the toil and hope of the husband-
68 Wycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration.
man, and rejoice that the sun, the rain, the quickened seed,
have clothed the fields and bent the bowers; so looking at
the hundred-fold fruits that have grown out of the labours
of Wycliffe and those inspired by his example, we rejoice,
in this spiritual harvest-time, over the beneficent and
enduring work of those early heroes.
An old poet said, “The flower has a divine secret to
reveal; it tells how moistened dust can be clad with the
glory of heaven.” Those antique parchments, moistened
under the pen of Wycliffe, had a divine secret to reveal;
they tell how those scrolls, which he bent over so long,
became effulgent with the glory of heaven. His version
made a new sunlight amid the shadows of the age—a sun-
light that betokened the coming of a brighter day. Could
we exhibit his well-worn pen, or the scroll on which he
wrote; or could we telephone to the ear those earnest
tones as he read his new translation from his little desk in
the church at Lutterworth, we might more vividly picture
some of the interesting incidents. Professional copyists
take down the words; throngs of listeners crowd the
church, and bend toward the Reformer like a field of grain.
The men of that age had human hearts like ours, that
pulsated with the same great needs, with the same great
longings, hopes, and fears; and they must have appreciated
the priceless boon when they were permitted to read, or
hear read, “every man in his own tongue, the wonderful
Works Of God.”
Tacitus said, “I can come to no certain conclusion
whether the affairs of men are guided by the immutable
law of destiny or by the whirling wheel of chance.” But
after the New Testament translated by Wycliffe appeared,
it is the testimony of an enemy of the movement, that
“one could not meet two persons on the highway, when
one of them was not a disciple of Wycliffe.” A new reli-
gious interest was excited. Wycliffe's name became a
watchword. It rang far and wide through Europe. His
version proved to be an engine of power. It awakened a
spirit of inquiry, and scattered the seeds of that religious
Address, by Enoch L. Fancher, LL.D. 69
revolution which, in little more than a century, astonished
and convulsed the nations of Europe.
A philosopher said, “Two things fill me with admira-
tion and veneration: the starry heavens above me, and
the moral faculty within me.” But Wycliffe's version ex-
torted a new cry: “That divine Word of Truth fills me
with admiration and veneration. Give me that sacred roll
that I may know the words of eternal life; give me that
heaven-reaching ladder that I may scale the skies; give
me that celestial light that I may find my way to God.”
Men found, like the wandering Israelites, the deserts of
earth impearled with heavenly manna; and, turning away
from the divinities of forest, sea, and mountain, they felt
sure of this, that “the kingdom of God had come nigh”
unto them.
Hitherto the Bible had been a sealed book to the com-
mon people; printing had not been invented. Even to
the learned the Hebrew and Greek originals were unknown,
and many questioned the stars and the dim light of the
cloister to learn something of their eternal destiny. Then
it was that Wycliffe's bold achievement met the great want
of hungry thousands, and set in motion a resistless tide
that moved on toward the great Reformation, and that
resulted in the complete independence of the English
Church, and of all Protestants of every name who speak
the English tongue.
If any one needs to be impressed with the providential
government of the world, let him contemplate the effect
of the translation of the Bible into the English tongue;
an achievement that more than Magna Charta has met the
want of the people, made the Reformation a natural conse-
Quence; and that has accelerated the march, hand in hand,
through the swift-footed ages, of Christianity and its con-
sequent civilization, in whose blended light we behold the
glory of the nineteenth century.
The English Church, whose liturgy connects us with
the far-off ages of early Christianity, had been founded
centuries before Wycliffe's translation, but its prayer-book,
70 TWycliffe Semi-Millennial Celebration.
now the casket of so many jewels, had not been revised to
its later perfection. Of course it had not been printed;
and Wycliffe's New Testament became a new tie between
rector and parish, and a common aid to religious worship.
Every responsive voice was now a psalter of thanksgiving
and praise, and every swelling heart a shrine of sacrifice
and incense. Shadows of the Dark Ages began to dis-
appear; the hill-tops of human hope grew radiant, as with
morning light; and the long-sealed wells of living water
were opened anew, never again to be closed to the thirsty
wayfarers of earth.
If the Bible were like “a lamp hung at the ship's stern,
as she is driven by chance winds over a tempestuous sea—
warning of no peril; lighting to no anchorage;” but only,
as other books, “casting its lurid lustre behind, over a
white wake of receding foam,” then, indeed, were there
little occasion to commemorate its translation into the
English tongue. But when it not only opens our vision
over events of the past, but draws aside the veil of the
future; when it teaches us of God, our loving Father; of
Christ, our dying and risen Saviour; of the Holy Spirit,
our help and sanctifier; when it points to heaven as our
home, and to an eternity of happiness as our inheritance,
then should we love the study of that book as the noblest
of all studies, and honour the men and the means by which
the incomparable treasure of an English version has been
to our dwellings brought. In the ineffable attractions of
that book, men are content with any temporal lot, for they
find therein the consolations of an éternal hope. Let us
bend our strongest efforts to circulate that book in the
English language and all other languages, throughout the
world,
“Till Christ shall have dominion
O'er river, sea, and shore,
Far as the eagle's pinion,
Or dove's light wing can Soar.”
Mr. President, I second the motion made by Mr. Parker.
#enediction, bu 33cu. Hr. &ermilue.
NOW may the blessing of the Most High rest upon the
American Bible Society and all kindred institutions. May
He grant that His Holy Word may have freer and freer
access to all kindreds and people and nations under the
whole heavens. May He also grant that blessings in their
rich abundance may come down upon the Bible cause
from the exercises of this evening.
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God
the Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, be
with you henceforth and for ever. Amen.
FROM WYCLIFFE'S VERSION.
Lºs first pmbirstonbinge this thung, that eth
prophetic of g(ripture is not made by propre
interpretatioun, forgothe propherit is not broust
to by manmug millr, but joln men of G500
inspirit with the fjoln & Just-gnaken.
II. PETER, 1. 20.