Dr. J. H. Todd, from a MS. belonging to Trinity college, Dublin); that in the same year he was elected a fellow of Merton college; and that in 1360 he commenced to write against the mendicant orders. But these are facts of his life, according to the same authority, "only by courtesy and repetition." "The 'Last Age of the Church' has been assigned to him in common with half the English religious tracts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in the absence of all external, and in defiance of all internal evidence; and the fellow of Merton was almost certainly another man of the same name, who died rector of a living in Sussex in 1383, and who in more than one circumstance of his life appears to have been confounded with the reformer; and the story which connects him with the controversies of 1360 can be traced in its growth, is implicitly contradicted by contemporary authority, and receives, to say the least, no Sanction whatever from the acknowledged writings of the reformer." "At last," continues Mr. Shirley, "in the following year we obtain a firm historical footing. In April, and again in July, 1361, Wycliffe appears as master or warden of Balliol college, Oxford. On the 16th of May of the same year he was instituted, on the presentation of his college, to the rectory of Fylingham in Lincolnshire, and shortly after resigned the mastership of the college, and went to reside on his living; and from the time of his accepting that rectory to his death, twenty-one years later, we never lose sight of him for any length of time." The year of his becoming a doctor of divinity is the most important date of his life, as, according to the information of writers of his own time, it was not till he took that degree and began to read divinity lectures at Oxford that "he broke forth into open heresy." This date is uncertain, but Mr. Shirley decides for 1363 as the most probable. He concludes also, upon what appear to be very fair and probable grounds, against the statement which is usually made, that in 1365 Wycliffe was made master of Canterbury hall, then recently founded by Archbishop Islep. It was the other John Wycliffe before mentioned who received this appointment, and who was engaged in all the legal disputes and appeals which resulted from his appointment being attempted to be set aside by Archbishop Langham, the successor of Islep. The only other changes of place and office which Wycliffe would appear to have experienced were these, that in 1368 he exchanged the rectory of Fylingham for the living of Ludgershall in Buckinghamshire, which he preferred for its being so much nearer to Oxford, the principal scene of his labours and influence; and that he removed from this again in 1374, upon the presentation of the crown, to the parish of Lutterworth in Leicestershire, which he held along with a prebend in the collegiate church of Westbury, and where he continued to labour till his death. "During all this time he continued to be an irregular resident at Oxford. In the years 1363-65, 1374-75, and 1380, we find him renting rooms in Queen's college, and several of his works, containing disputations 'in the schools or elsewhere,' and especially his sermons before the university, give us other though less definite indications of his residence." His literary life may be divided into three periods—the first extending to the year 1366 or 1367, when his important work, "De Dominio Divino," in its shorter form, appeared; the second period reaching from thence to 1378, the year of the great schism of the West, produced by the election of the two rival popes; and the third, from thence to the close of his life. Mr. Shirley very ably states the grounds of this division in the following terms—"In the striking preface to the 'De Dominio Divino,' Wycliffe declares his intention of dedicating his time henceforth exclusively to theology, a resolution which he seems firmly to have kept. This preface seems to me the true epoch of the beginning of the English reformation. In the division, therefore, which has been made, the first period includes the whole of Wycliffe's logical, physical, and philosophical works; in the second, he first appears as a reformer, but a reformer rather of the constitution than the doctrines of the church; the theological clement is closely united with the political, and his literary is subordinate to his practical influence. From the time of the great papal schism, the theological or doctrinal element becomes predominant in his works; he begins to write English tracts, to speak of the translation of the Bible, which was probably in progress at this time, and lastly, arriving at a conclusion to which he had long been tending, he put out in the spring of 1381 a paper, containing twelve propositions, in which he denied the doctrine of transubstantiation." The doctrines put forth by Wycliffe in his treatise, "De Dominio Divino," containing his theory of government, or of church and state, furnish the key to all the transactions, and labours, and dangers of his subsequent career. "The doctrine of the reformer was that the sovereignty claimed by the popes over all other earthly authority, had never been delegated by God to any man—that God had allotted only portions of dominion, particular fiefs, so to speak, to each; and if any one were to be held to be Christ's vicar upon earth—a term which he did not refuse to apply to the pope— the title was equally applicable to the temporal as to the spiritual chief. The king was the minister, the vicar of God in things temporal, and was therefore as much bound by his office to see that temporal goods were not wasted or misapplied by the clergy, as the clergy were to direct the spiritual affairs of the king; and while the pope and the king are indeed supreme each in their department, every christian man holds not indeed 'in chief,' but yet he holds of God, and the final irreversible appeal is therefore to the court, not of Rome, but of heaven." The emancipation of kings from the thraldom of Rome; the emancipation of the individual conscience from both pope and king; and the restoration of the church of Christ to purity by restoring her at once to poverty and independence of the state—such were the broad principles and the grand ideal aims of John de Wycliffe. No wonder that they agitated deeply the men of his own and succeeding times, and no wonder that they excited against him the fear, the hatred, and the persecutions of an arrogant and corrupt hierarchy.
In the struggle which Edward III. and his parliament had to maintain against the exorbitant claims and exactions of the court of Rome, principles like these, put forward with so much boldness, and maintained with a surpassing degree of learning and ability, which even his adversaries were compelled to acknowledge, could not fail to recommend Wycliffe to the favour and patronage of the court. As early as 1366 he speaks of himself as a royal chaplain, the same year in which he publicly defended in the schools of Oxford the memorable decision of parliament refusing the demand of the pope for payment of thirty-three years' arrears of tribute, alleged to be due by the kingdom under a convention of King John. In 1374 he was appointed upon a legation sent by Edward III. to Pope Gregory XI. to treat with his Holiness upon the practice of "papal provision" and other abuses; and it is probable that what he saw of the papal court on that occasion tended to deepen his aversion to the prevailing ecclesiastical system: for on his return to England he began to use the plain, homely, outspoken language which is proper to a reformer as distinguished from the learned author or the subtle disputant. He is quoted by one of his biographers as styling the pope in one of his writings or lectures, "Antichrist, the proud worldly priest of Rome, and the most cursed of clippers and purse-kervers" (cut-purses). It is no marvel then that his troubles with the hierarchy soon afterwards began. But he found a powerful protector in John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, who on political grounds was the determined enemy of the bishops, and made common cause with the reformer in opposing their exorbitant power and pretensions. He was summoned to appear before Courtney, bishop of London, at St. Paul's on the 3rd of February, 1377, and he appeared, accompanied by John of Gaunt and Lord Henry Percy, earl-marshal. High words ensued between the offended bishop and the haughty courtiers, and the court broke up in confusion without determining anything against the reformer. In 1378 a synod assembled in Archbishop Sudbury's chapel at Lambeth to try and condemn him, but with no better success. The citizens of London forced their way into the chapel and intimidated the synod, and a message arrived from the young king's mother prohibiting the clergy to proceed. It was not till 1381, when Wycliffe put forth at Oxford his twelve theses against the doctrine of transubstantiation, that the bishops were able to effect anything against his high credit and standing. These theses were undoubtedly heretical, and nobody could deny it. Even the duke of Lancaster could only concur in the theological censure of the vice-chancellor of Oxford, and advise the reformer to be silent in future on the subject; and when the archbishop assembled a provincial council at the Blackfriars in London in May, 1382, the clergy found no hindrance in arriving at a sentence in which they pronounced twenty-four conclusions gathered out of his writings to be heretical, appointed search to be made in Oxford for copies of his works, and condemned him to be banished from the university.
