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 JOHN WICLIF: 
 
 HIS DOCTRINE AND WORK. 
 
 AN 
 
 ADDRESS 
 
 AT THE 
 
 LINCOLN DIOCESAN CONFERENCE, 
 
 On Thursday, October i6tk, 1884. 
 
 BY 
 
 CHR. WORDSWORTH, D.D., 
 
 Bishop of Lincoln. 
 
 LINCOLN : WILLIAMSON, 290, HIGH STREET. 
 LONDON: RIVINGTONS. 
 
 Price Sixpence.
 
 The Bishop of Lincoln having been prevented by 
 illness from being present at the Diocesan Conference, 
 this Address, which had been announced to be given by 
 him, was delivered for him by the General Secretary 
 of the previous Conference, the Rev. J. Clements, 
 Sub-Dean of Lincoln.
 
 JOHN WICLIF. 
 
 AT a sessioL of the Convocation of this Province, 
 on May 16th last, the Archbishop of 
 Canterbury announced that he had received a com- 
 munication from the Archbishop of York, informing 
 him that the Bishops of the Northern Province had 
 resolved unanimously to take part in the " Wiclif 
 Quincentenary,^^ and he further expressed a hope 
 that the Suffragans of his Province would, in their 
 several Dioceses, associate themselves with their 
 Northern Brethren in that commemoration. 
 
 In compliance with that desire I now invite your 
 attention to this subject. It has a special interest for 
 ourselves in this Diocese. John Wiclifs life as a 
 great Academic Teacher and Schoolman was spent at 
 Oxford, which was then in the Diocese of Lincoln, 
 and all his pastoral cures, namely, Fillingham in the 
 County of Lincoln, to which he was presented on 
 May 16th, 1361, by Balliol College, of which he was 
 Master -} and Lutgurshall, in Bucks, which he ex- 
 changed for Fillingham, on 12th November, 1368, 
 and Lutterworth, in Leicestershire, to which he was 
 presented by King Edward III. on April 7th, 1374, 
 and at which he died on December 31st, 1384, were 
 in the Diocese of Lincoln in the fourteenth century.^ 
 
 1 See the Register of John Bokingham, Bishop of Lincoln, p. 130. His 
 name is written there, " Magister Johannes de Wycliffe." 
 
 2 On the life and writings of Wiclif let me refer to the following works : 
 Wilkins, Concilia, vol. iii. passim ; Fasiculi Zizaniorum Magistri Johannis 
 
 fVyclif, edited by the late Professor Shirley, Lond., 1858 ; W. Woodford's
 
 But the consideration of this matter has more 
 important demands on us in other respects. It may 
 serve to dispel the illusions of some who are enamoured 
 of the Church of Eome, and are tempted to fall away 
 to her ; it will shew the urgent need of a religious 
 Eeformation in England at that time, and will inspire 
 us with thankfulness to God for His goodness to the 
 Church of England in her Reformation, not merely 
 on account of what the Reformation did, but also for 
 what it did not do; that is, not only because it 
 removed manifold abuses, errors, and corruptions, but 
 also because it preserved what was Scriptural, Primitive, 
 and Catholic in the doctrine, government, and ritual 
 of the Church. 
 
 In order that we may deal impartially with this 
 subject, let me ask you to forget for a while that you 
 are living in the nineteenth century, and to transport 
 
 Report on Wiclifs writings to Archhishop Arundel, a.d. 1396; axi^ Articuli 
 Johannis Wyclifi Angli in Concilio Constantiensi damnati, a.d. 1414 ; in the 
 valuable Kepertory, Brown's Fasiculus rerum expetendarum et fugiendarum, 
 Lond., 1690, pp. 191 — 295 ; Henry Wharton's Life of Wiclifin Appendix to 
 Cave Hist. Liter., p. 61, ed. Basil, 1744; L'Enfant, Histoire du Concile de 
 Constance, Amst., 1727, torn, i., p. 230, 401 ; Fuller's Church History, Book 
 iv., cent. xv. ; Life of Wiclifhy Rev. John Lewis, Minister of Margate, with 
 a valuable appendix of documents, revised edition, Oxford, 1820 ; Lives of 
 British Reformers, with copious extracts from Wiclifs Works, Religious Tract 
 Society, 1831 ; Gieseler's Church History, Division iv., chap, viii., § 125 ; 
 Church History, cent, xiv., cp. 3 ; R. Vaughan's Life of Wiclif ed. 2 vols,, 
 Lond., 1831 ; Dr. Lechler's Life of Wiclif; Canon Perry's Students' Church 
 History, Lond., 1881, chap. xx. ; Wiclifs place in history, by Professor 
 Montagu Burrows, 1881 ; Canon Pennington's John Wiclif, S.P.C.K., 1884. 
 I have also consulted the Registers of Bishop John Bokingham, who was 
 Bishop of Lincoln (from 25tli June, 1363) during the greater part of Wiclifs 
 ministry in it, and for fourteen years after his death.
 
 yourselves to the fourteenth. One of our religious 
 Societies has recently promised to publish a printed 
 New Testament for a penny : but in Wiclif s age 
 there was not a single printed book in the world. 
 The first printed volume, with its pages numbered, 
 which appeared in England was u^sop's Fables, issued 
 from Caxton's Press exactly a hundred years after 
 Wiclif s death. The manuscript copies of the Bible 
 translated by Wiclif and his co-adjutor, Nicholas 
 Hereford, a little before Wiclif s death, and revised by 
 John Purvey after his death,^ cost about £40 apiece 
 at our present rate of money value. 
 
 Let us also bear in mind that John Wiclif and his 
 followers did not translate the Old Testament from 
 the Hebrew original, nor the New from the original 
 Greek, but from the Latin Vulgate. No Englishman 
 knew Hebrew at that time, and Eobert Groseteste, 
 Bishop of Lincoln in the preceding century (a.d. 
 1235 — 1254), was regarded as a prodigy because he 
 understood Greek. 
 
 Besides, it was not till after the year 1453, when 
 Constantinople was taken by the Turks, that Greek 
 Literature found its way into the West, and not till 
 then did Englishmen become acquainted with the 
 works of the great Theologians and Historians of the 
 Eastern Church in their original tongue. 
 
 3 For an account of these Versions see the Preface to the Holy Bible in 
 English, made from the Latin Vulgate by John Wiclif and his followers 
 about A.D. 1380, and revised by John Purvey about 1388, edited by the Rev. 
 John Forshall and Sir F. Madden, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 4 vols., 4to. The 
 New Testament has been edited separately, with an Introduction and Glossary, 
 by W. W. Skeat, M.A., Oxford, 1879.
 
 Nor was this all ; a large number of apocryphal 
 and spurious writings were then floating about in this 
 country, which were regarded by theologians with as 
 much reverence as Holy Scripture itself. If you will 
 examine the elaborate work of Wiclif's learned and 
 candid opponent, William Woodford, the Minorite 
 Friar, commissioned by Archbishop Arundel in 1396 
 to report to him after Wiclif s death on his greatest 
 work,* the Trialogus, you will see that this celebrated 
 controversialist appeals not only to such supposititious 
 works as Dionysius the Areopagite on the celestial 
 hierarchy, but also to the Decretals, now known to be 
 spurious, of the earliest Popes from St. Peter down- 
 wards ; and also to the apocryphal Acts of St. Peter, 
 St. Matthew, and St. Mark, which were generally 
 believed^ to be genuine, and which appeared to sanc- 
 tion almost all that then existed in the papal system, 
 such as the Supremacy of the Eoman Pontiff, the 
 dignity of Cardinals, the sanctity and antiquity of 
 the Monastic Orders ; the doctrine of Transubstantia- 
 tion. Indulgences, Purgatory, Auricular Confession, 
 Pilgrimages, — in fact all that was received and revived 
 by the Church of Pome at that time. 
 
 Considering therefore the scarcity of copies of the 
 Scriptures, and that spurious writings sanctioning the 
 doctrines and practices of the Papacy were revered 
 
 ■* It is contained in Brown's Fasiculus rerum expetendarum et fugien- 
 daruyn, London, 1690, vol. i., where it occupies 74 pages from p. 191. 
 
 ^ Wiclif himself quotes the Apocryphal Life of St. Clement as a genuine 
 work, 'Trialog., iv., 28, 29.
 
 generally as of no less authority than the Word of 
 God, we ought to make charitable allowances for those 
 papal divines who defended those doctrines and prac- 
 tices, which were associated in their minds, by the tradi- 
 tion of many centuries, with what was most venerable in 
 faith and worship, and who therefore denounced with 
 vehement indignation all those who, like John Wiclif, 
 rose up to impugn and subvert them. 
 
 John Wiclif stood almost alone among the Teachers 
 of his age as the champion of the supremacy and 
 sufficieucy of Holy Scripture. He was a great School- 
 man as well as divine. Many Schoolmen gloried in 
 other titles.^ One of them was called " doctor ange- 
 licus," another " doctor seraphicus," a third " doctor 
 subtilis," a fourth "doctor resolutissimus," a fifth, 
 — William Occam, the leader of the Nominalists, — 
 "doctor invincibilis." But John Wiclif was content 
 to be called " Doctor EvangelicusJ' He was like the 
 Merchantman in the Gospel seeking goodly pearls 
 (Matt. xiii. 45) ; he had found the pearl of great 
 price, — the Bible, — and he sold all for that. Papal 
 Decretals, acts of so-called Apostles and Evangelists, 
 the realistic dogmas of Platonic Metaphysics, and what 
 he had no less dearly cherished, the solid tenets of 
 Aristotelian Ethics, — all these he was ready to barter 
 for the Bible. " Let God be true, and every man a 
 liar" (Rom. iii. 4), if he dares to speak anything 
 against God, was his maxim. 
 
 ^ T ennema.nn' s PMlosopMe, Leipzig, 1829, §262— §271.
 
 In a noble passage of his Trialogus,^ — one of his 
 latest, and the greatest of his works, — following in the 
 steps of St. Augustine, of whom happily he was a careful 
 student and an intense admirer, and to whom he there 
 refers, he lays it down as a fundamental principle^ that, 
 in dealing with Holy Scripture, we must begin with 
 faith in the Godhead of Christ. He almost identifies 
 the written Word with the Incarnate Word. We 
 must learn to look up to Christ, Very God and Very 
 Man, putting into our hands the Old Testament, on 
 which in the days of His earthly ministry He set His 
 divine seal by acknowledging the Inspiration, and 
 Divine Authority of the entire Volume of the Hebrew 
 Scriptures ; and we must also contemplate the Eternal 
 Son of God delivering to us from heaven the New 
 Testament, which He wrote by the hands of His 
 Apostles and Evangelists, whom He taught all things, 
 whom He guided into all truth, and to whose remem- 
 brance He brought all things which He had said to 
 them on earth, by means of the Holy Ghost the 
 Comforter whom He sent down to them from heaven 
 (John xiv. 26 ; xv. 26). 
 
 John Wiclif affirmed his belief in the plenary 
 inspiration of Holy Scripture, and he boldly declared 
 his conviction that it was antichristian to doubt the 
 truth of any part of it.^ He therefore did not need 
 
 '' Trialogus, iii., 31. 
 
 ^ Cp. the wise and eloquent words of St. Augustine, de Civitate Dei. xi., 
 c. 2, "Ipsa Veritas, Deus, Dei Filius, &c., and c. 3, Hie prius prophetas 
 deinde per Se Ipsum,&c." 
 
 s Trial, iii., 31.
 
 the help of human criticism to convince him that the 
 documents, to which some of his opponents referred, 
 were spurious and untrustworthy. He saw that they 
 were unscriptural and anti- scriptural; that was enough 
 for him, he therefore rejected them ; and in his 
 vigorous and homely style he said that Priests who 
 spent their time in reading the Papal Decretals were 
 no better than fools. ^ 
 
 By God's good providence Wiclif s life was pre- 
 served amid many dangers for the accomplishment of 
 his great work, — the greatest work that was done in 
 that century, — the translation of the Holy Bible into 
 the English tongue. The version of the New Testa- 
 ment was executed by himself, that of the Old partly 
 by another, Nicolas Hereford, and partly by himself 
 at a time when he was suffering from sickness. 
 
 Pope Gregory Xlth ordered the Archbishop of 
 Canterbury and the English Bishops to apprehend 
 and imprison him. His opinions were denounced by 
 Archbishops Sudbury^ and Courtenay,^ and by a 
 Provincial Council at London (May 13, 1382) and he 
 was also condemned by the University of Oxford,^ and 
 his life was imperilled by illness. John Bokingham, 
 Bishop of Lincoln, in whose Diocese Wiclif spent his 
 ministerial life, was one of the ten Bishops* at the 
 
 ^ Brown, Fasicul., p. 292. 
 1 Wilkins, Concilia, iii., 123, 5 Kal., January, 1377. 
 2 Wilkins, Condi, iii., 157, May 17 and May 21. 
 3 Wilkins, iii., 170-172. 
 * See Fasiculi Zizaniorum, pp. 286-498. The celebrated William of 
 Wickham, Bishop cf Winchester, founder of Winchester College and New- 
 College, was also one of the Bishops at the Council. Bokingham's name does 
 not appear in the list of the Council in Wilkins Condi. , iii., 158.
 
 10 
 
 Council of the Earthquake (so called from the shock 
 which disturbed its proceedings) at Greyfriars, London, 
 May, 1382, where Wiclif himself was not present, but 
 where many of his doctrines were condemned. 
 
 The Bishop of Lincoln also cited William de 
 Swynderby, " the Wicliffite," to the Chapter House of 
 our Cathedral in the July following, and forced him 
 to recant his opinions.^ And in Archbishop Court enay's 
 Eegister*^ there is a letter to Bishop Bokingham, in 
 which he is praised for his zeal and courage in pro- 
 ceeding against "that Anti-Christ" (John Wiclif) 
 " Subverter of the faith." I cannot, however, find 
 any evidence in Bokingham's Kegister that he ever 
 summoned Wiclif before him ; probably the Bishop, 
 finding himself no match for Wiclif in learning, energy, 
 and ability, and conscious of the corruptions and 
 abuses of the Papal system, of which his Episcopal 
 Register exhibits melancholy evidence, allowed him 
 to remain unmolested in his Parish of Fillingham, then 
 at Lutgurshall, and lastly at Lutterworth, where he 
 died in peace five hundred years ago. 
 
 John Wiclif's career was marked by providential 
 interpositions. There was then a growing jealousy 
 between the Civil and Ecclesiastical Powers. Wiclif 
 almost alone among the Clergy, defended the temporal 
 authority against the spiritualty, which was alarmed 
 by the prospect of a heavy taxation of Ecclesiastical 
 
 ^ Fasic. Zizan., 334. There is a fuller account in Bishop Bokingham's 
 
 Register of the proceedings against Swynderby at Lincoln, Memoranda, pp. 
 
 ccxl. — ccxlii. 
 
 '' Wilkins Concilia, iii., p. 168.
 
 11 
 
 revenues for the public service. He was therefore 
 patronized by Edward III., and by his son, John of 
 Gaunt, the Eegent of the Kingdom, and for a time by 
 the nephew of John of Gaunt, King Eichard 11. The 
 schism also in the Papacy (a.d. 1378) and the feuds 
 of the two anti-popes Urban YI. and Clement VIL, 
 weakened the Papacy, and rendered it less able to 
 persecute : and Wiclif closed his career when sum- 
 moned to Rome, by a calm letter to Pope Urban VI., 
 exhorting him to become poor like Christ, and to give 
 up his secular sway to the temporal power. It was 
 not from want of will on the part of the Papacy 
 that Wiclif died in peace. This was clear from what 
 happened after his death. Even in his life-time one 
 of his co-adjutors in translating the Bible, Nicholas 
 Hereford, had been forced to recant, and another, John 
 Purvey, abjured his opinions'^ after Wiclif s death. 
 What Rome would have done to Wiclif while living 
 if she could, was shewn by what she did when he was 
 dead. In 1412 Archbishop ArundeP and his Suffragans 
 wrote to Pope John XXIII. , and reported to him how 
 " John Wiclif, a most wretched and pestilent person 
 of damnable memory, a son of the old serpent, and a 
 precursor and child of Anti- Christ, had endeavoured 
 to subvert the most holy faith and doctrine of the 
 Church with all his might ; and as a crowning act of 
 malignity had produced a new Translation of the 
 Scriptures in the Mother tongue." The Archbishop 
 
 '^ Feb. 29, 1400. Fasiculi, pp. 400, 410, 440. 
 ^ Wilkins, Concilia, iii., 350.
 
 12 
 
 sent to the Pope an elaborate examination and con- 
 demnation of Wiclifs heresies, extracted from his 
 writings by the University of Oxford,^ and supplicated 
 the Pope to order the bones of the heresiarch to be 
 dug up, and to be cast on a dunghill, or to be 
 burnt. On the 4th of May in the year 1415, the 
 Council of Constance^ reinforced this request ; and 
 finally Pope Martin in 1427 sent a command to 
 Eichard Fleming,^ Bishop of Lincoln (the founder of 
 Lincoln College, Oxford,) to put this decree into 
 execution f accordingly his bones were exhumed from 
 their grave in the chancel of Lutterworth Church, and 
 were burnt to ashes, which were cast into the Swift, 
 the brook near the church. 
 
 We have been considering the circumstances 
 which swayed the minds of Wiclifs opponents. Let 
 us now endea.vour to place ourselves in Wiclifs 
 
 Mbid., p. 339—349. ^ Labbe, Concilia, xii., 49. 
 
 ^ It has been said by some {e.g., Professor Eogers in his Gascoigne's 
 Loci., pp. viii.-lxxxv.) that Bishop Fleming was a renegade, having first favoured 
 Wicliffe's opinions. This is a mistake ; see Wilkins Concilia, iii., 172. 
 
 ^ Raynald Annal., 1427, I^o. 14. The University of Oxford gave a high 
 testimony to Wiclif on Oct. 5th, 1406, Wilkins, iii., 302, but entirely changed 
 its tone in 1412 ; Ibid., iii., 339-349. This latter document is very important, 
 because it quotes extracts verbatim from various treatises of Wiclif which it 
 specifies. In Capgrave's Chronicle, A.D. 1384, Wicliff"e is characterized as 
 ' ' the Organ of the Devil, the Enemy of the Church, the idol of heresy, the 
 mirror of hypocrisy, nourisher of schism. " Similar language is used by Wals- 
 ingham, quoted by Lewis, 124, where is a description of his death. See also 
 Ibid., p. 336, No. 25, where is an account of it by his Curate ; he had been 
 palsied for two years before his death. In Gascoigne's Loci., p. 141, he is 
 called "nequam rita, i.e., vita, 'wicked in life' (a pun on his name Wiclyff"e) 
 memoriae ter damnatae."
 
 18 
 
 position. He candidly confessed that he was of a hot 
 and impetuous temper,* and the eminence he had 
 attained among the schoolmen^ of his age at Oxford 
 made him self-confident and impatient of contradic- 
 tion. One of the least amiable characteristics of the 
 scholastic disputations of the time was that the com- 
 batants contended for victory rather than for truth. 
 The subtle entanglements of their dialectics were a 
 snare to them ; and were not favourable to the healthful 
 exercise of conscience and of reason. Without sub- 
 scribing to all that the Church Historian, Joseph 
 Milner,^ (an ardent partizan of Wiclif in many of his 
 doctrines,) has said on what he calls the sophistical 
 equivocations and evasions^ in some of Wiclif's vindi- 
 cations of himself when pressed by his opponents, 
 we cannot deny that even in abstruse questions of 
 theology he wrote sometimes as a schoolman rather 
 than as a divine.^ But his last resort at the close of 
 his career was to Holy Scripture.^ 
 
 Taking his position with the Bible in his hands 
 he was not unlike St. Paul at Athens when his spirit 
 
 * See the passage in Fascic. Ziz., p. xlvi. 
 
 ^ See this well stated by Professor Shirley, Fasc. Ziz. , p. xlvi.-li. 
 
 ^ Milner's Church History, Cent, xiv., chap, iii., p. 595-601, ed. Edin., 1842. 
 
 '' Some specimens of Wiclif's evasions may he seen in Lewis, p. 60-62, 
 65, 74, 75, 76, 118, 121. 
 
 ^ For example, in the first book of his Trialogus, where he argues con- 
 cerning the attributes of God, and even for the doctrine of the Trinity (chap. 
 6 and 7), from principles derived from Platonic Realism. 
 
 ^ We may notice an interesting intellectual and religious progress in his 
 Trialogus, completed after 1382 ; the first three books are Scholastic, the last 
 is purely Scriptural.
 
 14 
 
 was stirred within him by wliat he saw around him 
 (Acts xvii. 16). The abuses and corruptions of the 
 Papal system in England were then at their height. 
 The subject is too vast for us here. Let us confine 
 ourselves to Wiclif and to this Diocese. 
 
 Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln in the 
 thirteenth century, who is often quoted with honour 
 by Wiclif as " Lincolniensis," had done battle against 
 the Papacy ; for example, against the attempt of Pope 
 Innocent the Fourth, in 1253, to force his nephew,^ 
 an Italian boy, into a Prebendal Stall of Lincoln 
 Cathedral. Wiclif had defended the rights of the 
 Throne of England against the claim of Pope 
 Urban VI. for 33 years of arrears to the Papacy by 
 reason of King John's surrender of his crown to the 
 Roman Pontiff, which, as Wiclif showed, King John 
 was bound to defend, but had no power to give away. 
 Wiclif exposed in his two years' embassy at Bruges 
 (1374, 5) the usurpations and exactions of the Papacy 
 in disposing of Bishoprics and Benefices in England, 
 sometimes to foreigners who knew nothing of the 
 English language, even before they were vacant, by 
 Papal " provisions," as they were called,^ and in levy- 
 ing firstfruits and tenths upon them. In one year, 
 1360, six English Bishoprics were disposed of to 
 aliens. He had seen a Bishop of Lincoln, Bishop 
 
 ^ See Dr. Luard's edition of Grosseteste's Epistles, p. 432-442 . 
 
 ^ Cp. Gascoigne's Loci e Lihro Veritatuin, edited by Professor Tliorold 
 Rogers, Oxford, 1881, pp. 12, 26, 28, 52, 112, a work which reflects much 
 light on the abuses against which John Wiclif had to contend, and which he 
 tried to remove.
 
 15 
 
 Bokingham, and other Bishops, simoniacally intro- 
 duced into their Sees, and if he had lived a few years 
 longer he would have seen the same Bishop of Lincoln, 
 after a thirty-five years' Episcopate, dispossessed by 
 the cruel and arbitrary tyranny of the Pope (on pre- 
 tence of a translation to Lichfield which he declined), 
 to make room for the youthful illegitimate son of 
 John of Gaunt, Henry Beaufort, afterwards Cardinal. 
 He would have seen two Visitations of Lincoln 
 Cathedral by that Bishop,^ in which the lawless 
 violence and profligate licentiousness of some of its 
 members were exposed. And he had heard the 
 Eoman Pontiff, who practised and encouraged such 
 enormities as these, called " a God upon earth," and 
 " equal to the Son of God ; * and he had seen the 
 luxury of the Monastic Orders grasping the tithes of 
 Parishes by Appropriations.^ In Bishop Bokingham's 
 Eegister more than 40 such Appropriations of tithes 
 of Parishes in this Diocese are recorded. He had seen 
 the abuses of the Simoniacal Exchange of Benefices. 
 The same Register is full of them ; these combined 
 the evils of our modern Donatives and Bonds of 
 Resignation, and against them Archbishop Courtenay 
 
 ^ A.D. 1393, 1394. They are described in Bokingham's Memoranda, pp. 
 470-475. The records of them are very interesting, and ought to be printed. 
 In p. 476 Bishop Bokingham complains of the irreligious and immoral con- 
 dition of parts of his Diocese. 
 
 ^ See Wiclif's words in his work on the Church, edited by Dr. Todd, p. x., 
 and notes, pp. clxiv., ccvi. 
 
 5 On the Evils of Appropriations, see Gascoigne's Loci., ed. Thorold Rogers, 
 Oxford, 1881, p. 3, p. 70, p. 148.
 
 16 
 
 protested in vain.^ The Parish of Riseholme (then 
 written Rysum, or Rysom) seems to have suffered a 
 good deal in this way.'^ He saw and deplored the 
 ignorance of the Clergy, many of whom were put into 
 parishes for a slender pittance by the Monastic Houses 
 which devoured the tithes, and who did not know " the 
 Ten Commandments," and could not read a verse of 
 the Psalter.^ He saw the four Orders of Mendicant 
 Friars, 4,000 in number, like swarms of locusts, allowed 
 to rove freely over the parishes, and, as Wiclif's 
 contemporary, the Poet Chaucer, describes them,^ 
 supplanting the secular Clergy by " hearing sweetly 
 confessions," and, " pleasant was their absolution," 
 and by shriving men and women easily, and by coax- 
 ing them to " give money to the poore friars," instead 
 of " weeping and prayers," for (as Chaucer says) — 
 " Unto a poore Order well to give 
 Is signe that a man is well yshrive." 
 He had heard those covetous and hypocritical 
 vagabonds, who issued forth from what he calls 
 " Cayms Castles,''^ claiming to themselves the 
 
 ^ See his indignant letter on ChoppechiLrches in Wilkins Concilia, iii., 215. 
 
 '' See Bishop Bokingham's Register, p. 134 and 139, and at a.d. 1395, 
 where Rysum was exchanged with Fyliugham (Fillingham). 
 
 ^ Wiclif's Great Sentence of Curse Expounded, MS., c. 3-16, p. 40. 
 
 ^ See Chaucer's Canterbury Talcs Prologue, "A Friar there was," v. 280. 
 These roving mendicant friars invading the parochial cures, seem to have given 
 an impulse and a pretext for Wiclif's itinerant " Poor Priests." 
 
 ^ Trial., iv., 33. So called from Caym, the then received form of Cain 
 (the first murderer), and combining the initials of the four Orders, Carmelites, 
 Augustinians, Jacobites, or Dominicans (from Rue St. Jaques at Paris), and 
 Minorites, or Franciscans. See Dr. Todd's note, p. clxxiii., on Wiclif's 
 Tractate on the Church,
 
 17 
 
 monopoly of the name and essence of " religioii,^^ and 
 affirming that to die in their habit was a passport to 
 heaven. 
 
 These and other like things John Wiclif had seen 
 and heard. Was it wonderful that a person of his 
 fervid temperament, one whose heart glowed with zeal 
 for God, and whose mind was filled with the Word of 
 God as with an inward fire, striving to burst forth 
 from his mouth, should have been roused by a spirit 
 of indignation, and should have been transported 
 beyond the bounds of calm reason into extravagant 
 notions and intemperate effusions ? He would have 
 been something more than a man ; he would have 
 been like the Archangel Michael, disputing with 
 the Devil about the body of Moses (Jude 9), and 
 maintaining his angelic dignity and calmness in the 
 conflict with Satan, if it had been otherwise. 
 
 Not therefore in any captious or censorious spirit, 
 
 nor with any language of disparagement (heaven 
 
 forbid), let us now pass on to consider the errors into 
 
 which this great man was betrayed by a common 
 
 infirmity of human nature, even from his zeal for the 
 
 truth, and by an excess of reaction against its oppo- 
 
 sites, and by an unbounded exaggeration of the truth 
 
 itself, and by an overweening reliance on himself. 
 
 So certain is it, as the ancient poet says, that, 
 
 In vitium ducit culpse fuga, si caret arte ; 
 and. 
 
 Virtus est medium vitiorum ; et utrinque remotum.^ 
 
 3 Horat. A.P. 31 ; 1 Epist. xviii. 9 ; 1 Sat. ii. 14.
 
 History abounds with examples of religionists who 
 have imagined that evils in the Church can only be 
 cured by their opposites.* 
 
 In reviewing Wiclif's doctrines we do not arrogate 
 any superiority to ourselves, but we must express our 
 thankfulness to God, Who has taught us by the 
 experience of five centuries, and by the writings of 
 wise and learned men, especially of one to whom, under 
 God, the Church and Kealm of England have been in- 
 debted more than to any other for the solution of these 
 questions, and for a firm settlement in the truth, — a 
 person, who, like John Wiclif was first an honoured 
 Teacher in the University of Oxford, and afterwards 
 like him a plain Parish Priest in this Diocese, where 
 he was instituted to his first Benefice, Drayton- 
 Beauchamp, in 1584, just 200 years after Wiclif's 
 death, — need I mention to you the name of Richard 
 Hooker ? In his great work on the Laivs of Ecclesias- 
 tical Polity Eichard Hooker does not often mention 
 John Wiclif by name, but the Ecclesiastical Polity 
 may be regarded as corrective of John Wiclif's teach- 
 ing in almost every particular where that teaching 
 swerved from the truth. The careful student of 
 Hooker's work will have observed that in many 
 portions of it he is referring to the peculiar tenets 
 broached by Wiclif and his followers, and developed 
 afterwards by powerful partizans in England, and 
 producing their fruits in some of the most memorable 
 
 ^ This principle of the Puritan Theology has been exposed hy Hooker, 
 E.P. iv., viii.
 
 19 
 
 events of our history, both in Church and State. It 
 is on this account that the present subject is of so 
 much importance to ourselves, whether we be Clergy- 
 men or Laymen ; and I am therefore venturing to 
 dwell upon it at greater length than I should other- 
 wise have presumed to do. 
 
 In analysing Wiclif s tenets, we are encountered by 
 some persons with an objection that we are not com- 
 petent to deal with those opinions, because so many 
 of his works, — sufficient it is calculated to fill twenty 
 octavo volumes, — still remain in manuscript. But 
 I must demur to this allegation. We possess one 
 of Wiclif 's greatest and latest works, his Trialogus^ 
 in four books, in Latin, (and his Latin works are much 
 more scientific than his English,) which has been 
 printed three times,^ and which was written after 
 May, 1382,'^ that is only two years and a half before 
 his death. 
 
 This work, the Trialogus, is a systematic exposition 
 of theological doctrine and discipline ; and may be 
 regarded as his deliberate and final utterance on those 
 subjects. 
 
 We have also another important work of Wiclif in 
 English, entitled, 0?i the Church and her Members, 
 
 ^Called by Professor Shirley (i^asc. Ziz. xlvi.) "his greatest work, and 
 one of the most thoughtful of the middle ages." Professor Gieseler who gives 
 a syllabus of it, iv., 250, calls it "his theological bequest to the Church," and 
 L'Enfant, Concile de Constance, i., 222, describes it as " le plus important de 
 tous ses ouvrages." 
 
 6 In 1525 ; and at Francf., 1753 ; Oxford, 1869. 
 
 '' See Trial., iv., 27 ; and iv., 36, 37, where he refers to the Provincial 
 Council of the Earthquake in May of that year.
 
 20 
 
 publislied for the first time at Dublin, in 1851, by 
 the late learned Dr. J. H. Todd with notes, and 
 written by Wiclif a short time only before his death. ^ 
 
 Eeferring to these works as authoritative final 
 statements of Wiclif's opinions, we may now proceed 
 to specify some of the points in which he gave occasion 
 to dangerous consequences by exaggeration of truth, 
 or by excessive re-action against errors which he 
 endeavoured to correct by their opposite extremes. 
 
 First then as to Holy Scripture. 
 
 John Wiclif was filled with righteous indignation 
 against the Church of Eome for with-holding the 
 Scriptures, — which are the Bread of Life, — from the 
 people, and feeding them with the husks of fabulous 
 legends, and leading them astray with unscriptural, 
 and an ti- scriptural doctrines and practices, and he 
 boldly affirmed, as we have seen, the supremacy and 
 sufficiency of Holy Scripture. So far as Articles of 
 Faith and supernatural doctrines are concerned he did 
 well. But, as the experience of after generations has 
 shewn, he greatly erred in extending this principle to 
 rites and ceremonies^ of the Church other than the 
 Holy Sacraments, which are of divine institution and 
 of universal and perpetual obligation. 
 
 To look for a specification in Holy Scripture of all 
 rites and ceremonies, and to say that no rites or 
 
 ^ It mentions in p. xxxiii. the disastrous military Crusade under the 
 Bishop of Norwich into Flanders, in support of Pope Urban VI. ; which 
 expedition was in A.D. 1383, the year before Wiclif's death. See Dr. Todd's 
 note p. clxxvi. 
 
 ^ See his words in Wilkins, Concilia, iii., 347, No. 191, 192.
 
 21 
 
 ceremonies are to be used but such as are set down in 
 Scripture, was, as Eichard Hooker^ has proved by 
 irresistible arguments, to mistake altogether the pur- 
 pose of Scripture, and to ignore the functions of the 
 Church, which (as our 20th Article says) "has authority 
 to decree Kites and Ceremonies " ; and, as we read in 
 our 34th Article, "Every particular Church hath 
 authority to ordain, change or abolish, ceremonies or 
 rites of the Church ordained only by man's authority, 
 so that all things be done to edifying." 
 
 It was from this unhappy misconception of the 
 supremacy and sufficiency of Scripture in such matt<u^s 
 as these that the troubles and contentions of the 
 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries arose and were 
 fomented in the Church, which led to her disruption, 
 and with it to the fall of the Monarchy itself. This 
 erroneous notion led to the riots at Cambridge, when, 
 in Whitgift's mastership, the Undergraduates of 
 Trinity College and St. John's College threw off their 
 surplices in the chapels.^ 
 
 It was on this fallacious pretext that many of the 
 Clergy in Exeter Diocese refused to kneel at the Holy 
 Communion.^ It was on this plea that many persons 
 scrupled at the use of the Eing at Marriage and at 
 the sign of the Cross at Baptism.^ Organs and stained 
 glass in churches were offensive to them. These things, 
 
 ^ Who calls this the first Puritan principle. Book ii., chap, i. — v., and 
 cp. viii. ; Book iii,, ch. v. 
 
 ^ Strype's Annals, i., Pt. ii,, chap, xliv, 
 
 ^ Bishop Sanderson's Lectures on Conscience, Lect, iii,, 16. 
 
 ^ Hooker, iii,, chap, v.
 
 22 
 
 they said, were not sanctioned by Scripture, and there- 
 fore were to be abolished. The plea of the supremacy 
 and sufficiency of Scripture was made, an occasion for 
 subverting the authority of the Church ; and even led, 
 eventually, to denial of the truth of Scripture itself. 
 For (as our 20th Article well says) the Church is 
 " a witness and a keeper " of holy Writ ; and without 
 the Church it will not be easy to prove the inspiration 
 of Scripture itself, or to secure its right interpretation.^ 
 They who separate the Bible from the Church, are 
 in danger of losing both. 
 
 Another mistaken and dangerous principle to 
 which Wiclif 's teaching gave currency, was concerning 
 the Church itself. 
 
 According to him the Church consists only of holy 
 persons predestined by God to salvation. In his 
 Treatise on the Church'' he says that " Christ vouch- 
 safeth to call the Church His spouse ; but cursed men 
 he calleth fiends ; therefore if such men were mem- 
 bers of the Church, we should be forced to say that 
 " Christ had wedded the Fiend," and "Every member, 
 he sayth, of holy Church shall be saved with Christ. ""^ 
 
 ^ Hooker, i., chap. xiv. ; and on the dangerous consequences of the mis- 
 application of the principle as to the "perfection of Scripture," see Bp. 
 Sanderson's Lectures 07i Conscience, Lect. iv., ], 16, 19. 
 
 ^ Edited by Dr. Todd, p. iv. and p. v. As this is his latest work other 
 passages of a milder character, such as are quoted by Lewis, p. 152, cannot be 
 regarded as a set-off against it. 
 
 '' Cp. Lewis, p. 27, 28. Some of his last words on this subject are in 
 Trial., iv., 22. " We ought to deem that those who live holy lives with us 
 are sons of Holy Mother Church, and those who live otherwise are children of 
 Satan and the synagogue of Satan,"
 
 23 
 
 On these assertions Dr. Todd well observes^ that 
 " they contain the fundamental error committed by 
 WyclifFe and his followers which infected and distorted 
 their whole theology ; and it must be carefully borne 
 in mind if we would understand his system." 
 
 You will remember that a portion of the Third 
 Book^ of Richard Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, and 
 also of his Fifth Book,^ are specially devoted to a 
 refutation of this error, and to an exposure of its 
 dangerous consequences, as seen in the history^ of the 
 mistake of St. Cyprian and the African Bishops as to 
 the invalidity of Baptism administered by heretics, 
 and as displayed in the time of Athanasius when the 
 Luciferians refused to acknowledge Arian Bishops on 
 their repentance, and in the days of St. Augustine in 
 the schism of the Donatists, imagining themselves to 
 be the only pure Church of Christ ; and in the fan- 
 aticism of the Anabaptists and others in our own 
 country, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 
 who forgot our Lord's Parables in the 13th chapter 
 of St. Matthew concerning the mixed and imperfect 
 condition of His Church while upon earth, which He 
 compares to a field containing tares mingled with 
 wheat, and to a net having in it both good fish and bad ; 
 
 ^ Notes on that Treatise, p. clviii., and in Wilkins, iii., 248. Qui pec- 
 cator est aliqua sorde maculatus nou potest de Christi Ecclesia appellari. 
 9 Hooker, E.P., iii., ch. i. 
 
 ^ Hooker, E. P., v., chap. Ixviii., 6, and our own 26th Article. "In the 
 Visible Church the evil will be ever mingled with the good, and sometimes 
 the Evil have chief authority in the Ministration of the Word and Sacraments. " 
 2 Hooker, iii., ch. i. and v., ch. Ixii.
 
 24 
 
 and who, ignoring the truth that it is God only that 
 can read the heart, and that all who profess publicly, 
 and openly acknowledge " one Lord, one Faith, one 
 Baptism," are to be owned by us as members of the 
 visil)le Church, claimed to be the only Saints, and to 
 be the only true Church of God, and who, on the plea 
 of zeal for Him and for the holiness of His Church, 
 would have exterminated all others as no better than 
 heathens and infidels, and would have seized even on 
 all civil power and pre-eminence as an inheritance 
 which Christ the Lord of all had given to them as the 
 Saints, who alone ought to rule on earth. 
 
 When we bear in mind Wiclif's opinions on the 
 Church as a society consisting only of holy persons, 
 and when we remember the corruptions and abuses 
 which he saw in the Church of Eome, then dominant 
 in England, we are not surprised to find that he 
 denounced the Pope as the manifest chief " antichrist "^ 
 of St. John, and his Cardinals and Bishops as " Children 
 of the Fiend and sons of Belial " ; and the Church 
 herself as a " synagogue of Satan."* 
 
 He little foresaw the consequence of such assertions 
 as these. The acts of the Clergy of such a society in 
 administering the Word and Sacraments, were con- 
 
 3 "Patulus i^ntichristus," and "abomination of desolation." Wilkins, 
 iii., 30. On his return from his two years' embassy at Bruges, in 1376, Wiclif 
 called the Pope "Antichrist, the proud worldly Priest of Kome, and most 
 cursed of clippers and purse kervers." Lewis, 37. 
 
 ^ See Brown, Fasic, p. 292.
 
 25 
 
 sidered by him and his followers^ as vitiated and 
 nullified by the heresy and wickedness of the minister, 
 and it was a necessary corollary of such propositions 
 that a new Church of Christ must be set up in 
 England by his disciples ; and thus a door was opened 
 to the endless multiplication of religious sects which 
 England saw in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 
 and which overthrew her civil as well as her Ecclesi- 
 astical polity ; and which still paralyses her in her 
 warfare against sin and error, and in her endeavours to 
 spread the faith of Christ at home and abroad. 
 
 Against such wild and dangerous speculations let 
 us again appeal to the calm wisdom of Richard Hooker,^ 
 who says, " They " (the Romanists) " ask us where our 
 Church did lurk, — in what cave of the earth it slept 
 for so man)/ hundred years together, — before the birth 
 of Martin Luther ? as if we were of opinion that 
 Luther did erect a new Church of Christ. No : the 
 Church of Christ which was from the heginuing, is, 
 and continueth, unto the end ; of which Church all 
 parts have not been always equally sincere and sound." 
 And as to the Church of Rome, he says, " We dare 
 not communicate with Rome concerning sundry her 
 gross and grievous abominations " (which we removed 
 
 ^ See ^ilkins, Concilia, iii., 157. Episcopus aut Sacerdos in peccato 
 mortali non ordinat nee consecrat nee baptizat. The benedictions of heretical 
 Bishops are maledictions, iii., 343, cp. p. 342. It is true that in one of his 
 works he says that a cursed man doth fully the sacraments though it be to his 
 own damning (Lewis, p. 118-144), but he also said that "wicked men's 
 prayer displeaseth God, and harmeth themselves and the people," IMd, 144. 
 How then could their ministry of Sacraments also with prayers be salutary ? 
 
 ^ Hooker, iii., cli. i. 
 
 I
 
 26 
 
 at the Reformation, and which she would impose upon 
 us), " yet touching those main parts of Christian truth 
 wherein they constantly still persist, we gladly acknow- 
 ledge them to be the family of Jesus Christ, and our 
 prayer is that they may so frame and reform them- 
 selves that no distraction remain in anything." And 
 our own Bishop Sanderson, who loved to tread in 
 Hooker's steps, while he affirms that Rome is "the 
 chief cause of the schisms in Christendom," by en- 
 forcing new and heretical terms of Church Communion,"^ 
 says also, that " the great promoters of the Roman 
 interest among us,^ and betrayers of the Protestant 
 cause, are they who among other false principles 
 maintain that the Church of Rome is no Church " ; 
 because they forget that she still has the Holy 
 Scriptures, and the Three Creeds, and the Sacraments 
 of Christ, and a succession of Bishops, Priests, and 
 Deacons ; and thus they afford a triumph to the 
 Romanists who allege that we set up a new Church at 
 the Reformation, and are therefore no Church at all ; 
 and they give countenance to those who set up new 
 sects in opposition to the Church of England. What 
 the Church of England did at the Reformation was 
 to clear herself from novel Romish corruptions, and to 
 preserve the ancient Church of Christ which had existed 
 in this country in unbroken continuity, in various 
 degrees of purity, since the times of the Apostles. 
 
 So much as to Wiclif 's teaching on the Church. 
 Let us now hear his opinion of the Christian Ministry. 
 
 "^ Bp. Sanderson, Sermon xi , § 5, and his last will and testament. 
 ^ Bp. Sanderson, Preface to his Sermons, p. xviii.
 
 27 
 
 " I boldly affirm/'^ he says, " that in the Primitive 
 Church, in the time of St. Paul, two orders of Clergy 
 were sufficient, namely, the order of Priest and 
 Deacon ; and that a Presbyter and Bishop were the 
 same.'' 
 
 Allowance must be made for such assertions as 
 these. As the next sentence shews, Wiclif was puzzled 
 by the many orders and degrees of Ecclesiastics, which 
 he saw in the Eoman Church, and which he there 
 enumerates. " Pope, Cardinals, Patriarchs, Arch- 
 Bishops, Bishops, Archdeacons, Officials, and Deans " ; 
 and by one stroke he would have reduced them all to 
 two, on the supposed authority of Holy Scripture, 
 which he regarded as sufficient and supreme in such 
 matters as these. 
 
 He forgot that for the right understanding of 
 Scripture the testimony of Church History and the 
 evidence of the practice of the ancient Church are 
 requisite ; and that as our own Church expresses it 
 in the Preface to her Ordinal, "It is evident unto all 
 men diligently reading the Holy Scripture and ancient 
 authors that from the Apostles' time there have been 
 these orders of Ministers in Christ's Church, Bishops, 
 Priests, and Deacons." 
 
 Wiclif was a Predestinarian' in religion, and a 
 
 9 Wiclif, Trial., iv., 15 ; cp, Wilkins, iii., 344. 
 ^ See Trial., ii., 14, Deus necessitat creaturas singulas activas ad quem- 
 libet actum suum ; sic sunt aliqui prsedestinati ad gloriam, aliqui ad poenam 
 perpetuam ordinati, and iii. c. 7, Gratia non potest excidere, and see iii., 102, 
 Omnia eveniunt necessitate absoluta. Cp. Joseph Milner's Church Hist, on 
 Wiclif, chap, iii., cent, xiv., p. 607, ed,, Edin. 1842. "The Church is an 
 assembly of predestinated persons,"
 
 ^/ 
 
 28 
 
 Presbyterian in Church government,^ and his opinions 
 in both respects bore fruit afterwards at Geneva and 
 in Scotland, and if he and his followers had been 
 allowed to have had free play in England, the 
 Reformation in this Country would have resembled the 
 Reformation that afterwards took place at Geneva 
 under John Calvin, and the Reformation that was 
 effected in Scotland under John Knox. 
 
 Providentially this misfortune was averted ; after a 
 long struggle of nearly three centuries, the Church of 
 England not only cleared herself by God's good 
 providence, from the grievous errors and corruptions 
 of Rome, but was also preserved from those reckless 
 reliofious innovations which caused so much havock 
 in Switzerland and Scotland, and spread so much 
 mischief in other lands. 
 
 Here again we may refer to Richard Hooker. He 
 had been educated under Puritan influence ; and his 
 early tendencies were toward Presbyterianism. He 
 candidly owns that the doctrine which had been 
 propounded by Wiclif and adopted by Calvin and 
 Knox, that the Christian Ministry^ consists only of 
 two orders. Presbyters and Deacons, and that in 
 Scripture Bishops and Presbyters are identical, — had 
 formerly seemed probable to himself ; but after a 
 careful investigation of the subject, illustrated by 
 the light of Scripture and of Church History, (as 
 
 2 Trial., iv., 15, cp. Vaughan's Life of Wiclif, i., 392, 398 ; ii., 274. 
 
 3 See Hooker, vii., xi., 8, where he calls it a doctrme "which he himself 
 had once judged a great deal more probable " than he afterwards did.
 
 29 
 
 displayed in his Seventh Book^ where the subject 
 is examined) he deliberately states his conviction 
 as follows^ ; "let us not fear to be herein bold 
 and peremptory, that if anything in the Church's 
 government, surely the first institution of Bishops " 
 (as a distinct order from Presbyters) "was from 
 heaven, was even of God. The Holy Ghost was the 
 Author of it." 
 
 As to the Christian Sacraments, Wiclif affirmed 
 the necessity of Baptism,^ and that sin original and 
 actual was washed away by it, and he approved the 
 appointment of Sponsors in Infant Baptism, and 
 acknowledged, in case of necessity, the validity of 
 Lay Baptism. He does not determine the question 
 whether Children can be saved without Baptism ; but 
 inclines to think that they can, since " God is more 
 inclined to reward men than to condemn." 
 
 With regard to Confirmation it need not surprise 
 us that Wiclif was not prepossessed in its favour. The 
 Church of Eome did not practice the laying on of 
 hands (which in Holy Scripture^ was the outward sign 
 of the inward gift); and the use of oil and other 
 ceremonies in administering it, not being found in 
 Scripture, created in Wiclif 's mind a prejudice against 
 it ; and it was administered in a light and perfunctory 
 manner. It has been recorded as a proof of the 
 
 * Hooker viii., ch. i., cli. xi. — ch, xiii. 
 
 ^ Hooker, vii. , ch. vi. 
 
 " Wiclif, Trialog., iv., 11, 12, 13 ; cp. Lewis, p. 165, 166. 
 
 ^ Acts viii. 17, 19 ; xix. 6 ; Hebrews vi. 1. Wiclif, Trialog., iv., 14.
 
 30 
 
 reverence with which Confirmation was regarded by 
 the great Bishop of Lincoln, St. Hugh, in the twelfth 
 century, that he was distinguished from his contem- 
 porary Bishops by never administering it on horseback ; 
 
 Tanta ministerii reverentia pontificalis, 
 
 Ut nullum confirmet eqiies.^ 
 
 No wonder that the " levis et brevis^ confirmatio " as 
 Wiclif calls it, found little favour in his eyes : and 
 the vicious lives, and heretical tenets of many of 
 the Bishops who administered it, seemed to him to 
 impair its validity. 
 
 Here also we may be content to appeal to Kichard 
 Hooker who has supplied a sufiicient answer to all 
 objections to Confirmation, and a clear and conclusive 
 statement of the Apostolic origin and spiritual benefit 
 of Confirmation, as a special function of the Episcopal 
 Office, in his fifth book.-^ 
 
 With respect to the Holy Eucharist of the Body 
 and Blood of Christ, Wiclif was the first who lifted 
 up his voice with boldness and power against the 
 Koman dogma of Transubstantiation.^ 
 
 No doubt Bertram or Ratram, the celebrated Monk 
 of Corbey, in the ninth century (to whom Bishop Eidley 
 owed so much),^ had protested against the doctrine of 
 
 8 Metrica Vita St*. Hugonis, v. 769. 
 
 ^ Trial., iv., 14. ^ Hooker, v., ch. Ixvi. 
 
 2 For his teaching on the Holy Eucharist see Trialogus, iv., ch. 2-10. 
 
 ^ See the words of Kidley, quoted in Dr. Gloucester Ridley's Life of Ridley, 
 Lond., 1763, pp. 164-168 ; cp. 618, 619, 664, 681, where a real spiritual 
 presence is emphatically declared by Ridley to be the doctrine of the Holy 
 Scripture and of the Catholic Fathers of the Church. See also Neander, 
 Church History, vi., 302-304.
 
 31 
 
 Transubstantiation ; and Berengarius in the eleventh, 
 who profited by Ratram's labours, did the same ; to 
 whom Wiclif often refers. But Wiclif denounced it 
 with all his might as an antichristian heresy,* and as 
 a dangerous and deadly^ invention of the Evil One. 
 
 He was scarcely less tolerant of the dogma of 
 Consubstantiation,^ and for this and other reasons 
 Wiclif s memory has been treated with great asperity 
 by Luther"^ and Melanchthon. So far his opinion, on 
 the negative side, is clear ; but what his positive 
 teaching on the subject was is not so evident. Some- 
 times he seems to incline to what was afterwards 
 called Zwinglianism, as when he says that the words 
 of our Lord " This is My Body," " This is My Blood," 
 may be illustrated by His language concerning John 
 the Baptist.^ " This is Elias," and are spoken only 
 figuratively, and sacramentally, but he affirms that 
 our Lord's Body which is in heaven is actually present 
 in the consecrated elements, and he savs that it is 
 
 ^ See Neander, Church History, vi., 313. 
 
 ^ He says, Trial., iv., 6, that there cannot be a more impious heresy than 
 that which asserts that in the Holy Eucharist there is " accidens sine subjecto," 
 i. e., the colour and taste of bread without the substance of bread. 
 
 6 Trial, iv., 8. 
 
 ''Luther calls him the " Spitzigen Wickliife," and Melanchthon says, 
 "plane furebat." See the passages in Gieseler's Church History, Div. iv., ch. 
 viii., and see the citations in Wirth's edition of the Trialogus, p. 30, 31, 32, 
 note ; and in Vaughan's Wiclif, 324, 340. 
 
 ^ Trial., iv., 7. He quotes also Genesis xli. 26, "'the seven kine and the 
 seven ears are {i.e., represent) seven years."
 
 32 
 
 there "habituclinaliter,"^ a word derived from the 
 Schools ; and he says that when he sees the host he 
 adores it " conditionaliter," and that he devoutly and 
 entirely adores the Body of Christ which is in heaven. 
 
 Wiclif did a great work in defending the Church 
 of England from the heresy of Transubstantiation, and 
 in emboldening our forefathers in the fifteenth and 
 sixteenth centuries to give their bodies to be burned 
 rather than accept that heresy as a term of Church 
 Communion. But we must look to later Divines, 
 especially to Bishop Kidley, and to Richard Hooker/ 
 for a declaration of the true scriptural and Catholic 
 doctrine of a real spiritual presence of the Body and 
 Blood of Christ in the Holy Communion, and of the 
 inestimable blessings communicated thereby both to 
 the soul and body, namely, the washing away of sins 
 by His most precious Blood, and the pledge of a 
 glorious Resurrection and a blessed Immortality to 
 the body and soul by virtue of the indwelling and 
 operation" of Him Who is Very God and Very Man, 
 and Who is the Resurrection and the Idfe, and Who 
 communicates Himself both as G od and Man, to every 
 penitent, faithful and loving receiver in that Holy 
 Sacrament. 
 
 Wiclif's opinions on Marriage^ and Celibacy 
 
 ^ Hoc Sacramentum est Corpus Christi in forma panis. Trial., iv., 2, 
 quodammodo bene, pulchre, realiter, iv., 3 ; iv., 7 ; iv., 8 ; iv., 9 ; iv., 10, 
 habitudinaliter, cp. Wilkins, iii., 342, and Wiclif's words in Lewis, p. 103, 
 where he denounces as heretics those who deny the Sacrament to be God's Body. ' 
 
 ^ Hooker, v., ch. Iv., 8, 9 ; and v., ch. Ixv., 11. ^ See Trial., iv., 19.
 
 33 
 
 deserve to be noticed. He regarded^ celibacy as the 
 preferable state where it could be received ; but be 
 was opposed to the imposition of vows of celibacy on 
 the Clergy or others ; and the consequences of this 
 enforced celibacy on men and women are displayed in 
 strong language by him and his followers.^' He thought 
 that Marriage without expectation of offspring was 
 sinful, and he did not realize the force of the eighteenth 
 chapter of Leviticus, which the Church of England, 
 with the rest of the Church Catholic, regards as a 
 Divine Code, obligatory on all nations, and as pro- 
 hibiting Marriage within certain degrees of kindred 
 and affinity. Indeed the arbitrary multiplication of 
 prohibitions of Marriage by the Church of Rome 
 extending them to what she called "spiritual affinity," 
 seems to have inclined Wiclif i6 reject all prohibitions 
 entirely.^ This is a characteristic specimen of the 
 impatient waywardness of his mind. 
 
 With regard to a future state, he clung to belief 
 in Purgatory,^ but he thought that the poor no less 
 than the rich had a claim to share in the treasure of 
 the merits of the Church, and therefore did not believe 
 that the rich could do any good by bequeathing money 
 for masses after their death. He believed in the 
 eternity of future rewards and punishments.^ He 
 rejected the doctrine of the Mediatorship of Saints, 
 and declared that Christ is the only Mediator.^ 
 
 3 See his words in Lewis, p. 164. 
 
 4 See his words in Lewis, 163, and cp. Wilkins, viii., 363, 367, Lewis, 337. 
 
 5 See Trialog., iv., 20. « gee Wilkins, p. 347. 
 
 7 Trial., iv., 39-44. » Trial., iii., £0.
 
 34 
 
 Before I conclude, let me refer to some of his 
 opinions, which are of special interest at the present 
 time. 
 
 He was an advocate for the disestablishment and 
 disendowment of the Church, as it was then.^ Con- 
 sidering his peculiar temperament, and looking at the 
 enormous wealth of the Bishops and Clergy, especially 
 of the Monastic Orders at that time, and at the 
 unscrupulous means which they used to amass and 
 augment it, and at the pompous ostentation and 
 luxurious self-indulgence in which they expended it, 
 we can hardly be surprized that Wiclif should have 
 been ready to aid in despoiling them of that which was 
 so ill-gotten and so grossly abused. But here also he 
 was betrayed by an excess of reaction into the con- 
 trary extreme. He went so far as to say that not 
 merely ought the Temporal Rulers to take away 
 endowments from a delinquent Church, but that they 
 ought to be condemned if they did not ;^ and that, 
 Civil Powers ought to be punished if they endowed 
 the Church.^ 
 
 He often refers to the legend, then commonly 
 believed, that the Church of Rome had been endowed 
 in the person of Pope Sylvester, by the Emperor 
 Constantine, and that a voice was then heard from 
 
 9 Cp. Vaughan's Wiclif, ii., 250-254, 257, 266. 
 
 ^ Wiclif, Trial., iv., 1 5. Debent auferre temporalia sub poena damnationis ; 
 Sseculares propter dotationem Ecclesiae sunt puniendi ; tene firmiter et nulla- 
 tenus dubites, quin temporales domini in isto graviter peccaverunt. Wilkins, 
 iii., 340, 341. 
 
 2 Wiclif, Trial., iv., 18. Cp. Vaughan's Wichf, i., 319 ; ii. 230-242.
 
 35 
 
 heaven, " To-day has poison been poured into the 
 Church." He was of opinion that there could be no 
 such thing as Evangelical purity without Apostolic 
 poverty. 
 
 He thought that tithes were a remnant of Judaism,^ 
 and ought to be abolished, and could only be accepted 
 as " pure alms," and might be withheld by the tithe- 
 payer from an ungodly Clergyman,^ and that Christian 
 Pastors ought to imitate^ Christ Who had not where 
 to lay His head. He utterly misliked that Clergymen 
 should hold any Civil Magistracy,^ or be Justices of 
 the Peace. 
 
 The results of such teaching as this were seen in 
 the sixteenth century, when the Monasteries were 
 dissolved, and tithes and revenues were given by 
 Parliament to Henry VIIL, who enriched his favour- 
 ites with the spoils of the Church. 
 
 Wiclif, who had invoked the aid of the Temporal 
 Power to despoil the Church, would probably have 
 changed his mind when he had seen the Abbey lands 
 transferred to courtiers and nobles, and an annual sum 
 of more than £100,000^ diverted from Parochial uses 
 to the enrichment of secular houses,^ and about 260 
 Lay Persons becoming Impropriators of Tithes, so that 
 it was calculated in the year 1833^ that out of 10,540 
 
 3 Cp. Vaughan's Wiclif, ii., 250-254. 
 
 4 Wilkins, Concilia, iii., 157. ^ Wilkins, iii., 347. 
 
 ^ Ibid, p. 347. Vaughan's Wiclif, ii., 258. 
 
 "^ Hooker, vii., ch. xxiv., calculated it at £126,000 per annum. 
 
 8 Basire on Sacrilege, p. 118. Ed. Lond., 1668. 
 
 ^ Tables of Tithe Commissioners, 1833.
 
 36 
 
 Benefices in England and Wales 2,552, with an annual 
 value of £731,535, were in Lay hands. 
 
 On this question also let me refer again to Kichard 
 Hooker who deals with it fully in his seventh book, 
 where he mentions this opinion of Wiclif, and calls it 
 *' a palpable error," ^ and speaks of "the sacrilegious 
 intention of Church robbers which lurked under the 
 plausible name of Reformation." ''The goods of the 
 Church," he says, " belong not to man^ but to God ; 
 the Clergy are God's receivers, and to rob them is to 
 rob God, as the prophet declares (Mai. iii. 8) ; and it 
 is the duty of all men to consecrate their substance to 
 Him ; and for the sin of sacrilege God's judgment will 
 surely overtake those men and nations who commit it." 
 
 Our own experience in England and in Ireland may 
 serve to confirm the truth of these words of Richard 
 Hooker, who asserts that in such cases as these wherein 
 the example of Christ's poverty was profanely alleged,* 
 it was the plea of Julian the Apostate, when he 
 wanted to rob the Church. We must all, he says, whether 
 Clergy or Laity, follow Christ in all that is good and 
 holy, especially in meekness, poverty of spirit, and in 
 love, but he adds^ we are not to follow Him, " as 
 
 ^ Hooker, vii,, ch. xxii,, and Mr. Keble's note. Melanchthou (quoted above), 
 says that Wiclif s doctrine was "madness." Plane furehat Wiclefus. 
 
 ^ Ibid, vii., ch. xxi., xxii. He quotes Proverbs iii. 9 ; Malachi i. 8, iii. 10 ; 
 
 cp. vii., ch. xxiv. 
 
 4 Hooker, vii., ch. xxiii. 
 
 ^ Hooker makes a distinction between Monastic Property — especially such 
 as was applied to superstitious uses — and Ecclesiastical Property devoted to 
 the true worship of God and the salvation of souls. The tenure and appli-
 
 37 
 
 thieves follow true men, to take their goods by 
 violence from them. God, he says, is righteous in 
 taking away that which men abuse, but does that (he 
 asks), excuse the violence of thieves and robbers ? '' 
 
 A practical moral may hence be derived by us, my 
 reverend Brethren. 
 
 If the Clergy are — (as Hooker calls them) — God's 
 receivers, and if they who rob the Clergy rob God ; 
 let us remember also that we are God's stewards and 
 dispensers, and are bound to employ our endowments 
 as far as we are able for the promotion of His glory, 
 and for the good of the souls committed to our charge. 
 And if we act in the full consciousness of this obliga- 
 tion, then, even though men should wrong us by 
 despoiling us of earthly possessions, which are God's, 
 we shall have good reason to hope that we shall 
 receive from God other endowments far more precious 
 than lands and houses, even an everlasting inheritance 
 in His kingdom of heaven. 
 
 I have trespassed long on your indulgence, in 
 compliance with the request of the Archbishop 
 of this Province, to whom this Diocese owes a 
 debt of gratitude for services rendered during his 
 connexion, as Chancellor, with the Cathedral Church of 
 Lincoln from 1869 to 1877; and I have also ventured 
 to do so because, in the words of a learned writer^ the 
 
 cation of the former may be modified ; but neither the one nor the other ought 
 to be secularized. He does not excuse the abuse of the goods of the Church, 
 but if abuse of property is to be pleaded as a reason for spoliation, no property 
 would be safe, vii., ch. xxiv., 24. Cp. Mr. Keble's Preface to Hooker, p. xcv. 
 8 Dr. J. H. Todd in his edition of Wiclifs three Treatises, Dublin, 1851.
 
 38 
 
 consideration of this subject, while it proves the 
 urgent need there was of a religious Eeformation in 
 England in the age of Wiclif, cannot fail to render us 
 thankful to Almighty God that our Reformation was 
 not conducted on some of the principles I have speci- 
 fied, which were advocated in Wiclif s writings ; but 
 that it pleased Him to raise up other men after him, 
 who emulated his zeal, and profited by his labours, 
 especially by the unspeakable benefit which he was 
 the first to confer on England, the inspired Word of 
 God in our mother tongue ; and who were enlightened 
 by divine grace, and made wise by the teaching of 
 events, and who have bequeathed to us the precious 
 inheritance of a Church, not indeed according to 
 Wiclif s ideal, which never has been, and never will be 
 realized in this world, exempt from all earthly taint 
 and imperfection, — but a Church grounded on the sure 
 foundation of Holy Scripture, and professing the true 
 faith, as expounded by the ancient Church Universal 
 in her Creeds, and dispensing the Holy Sacraments 
 by the ministry of the three orders of Bishops, Priests, 
 and Deacons, deriving their commission by a continuous 
 and uninterrupted succession through eighteen cen- 
 turies from the holy Apostles, and from the Hand of 
 Christ Himself ; and which has been watered by the 
 blood of Martyrs, dying in defence of truths pro- 
 claimed by Wiclif to the world, and which has 
 diffused the pure light of the Gospel by Christian 
 Missions and Apostolic Churches founded in all parts 
 of the globe ; and which we may humbly believe the
 
 39 
 
 beatified spirit of John Wiclif, now purified from the 
 dross of human passion and infirmity, would rejoice 
 to recognize as a resemblance of the primitive Church 
 in doctrine, government, and worship, and which is 
 enabled by God's grace to train her children upon earth 
 for the everlasting peace and felicity of the Church 
 glorified in heaven. 
 
 James Williamson, Printer, 290, High Street, Lincoln,
 
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