rally predisposed to compromise. Is it not reasonable to suppose that the Oxford scholar with his secular sympathies, the man of affairs living and working amongst his own countrymen, the patriot and man of letters,[1] would have been well satisfied to advance step by step—so that the advance was indisputable,—leading and not outrunning the spirit of his times?
An English clergyman before everything else, John Wyclif inherited the ideas of Marsiglio and Ockham without claiming the whole of his inheritance. Deeply sympathetic for his unfortunate fellow-countrymen, as modest and simple in spirit as he was, intellectually eager and ambitious, he aimed at being an orderly, a progressive, and yet an effectual Reformer. It was only after the defiance and exasperation of his enemies that he was forced into the attitude of an open heretic.
- ↑ Every Schoolman who made his mark must have studied the mathematics and science of his day. Wyclif, for instance, is pretty sure to have read the works of Roger Bacon, and to have cleared his mind by straining it through the scientific sieve. There is a sentence in the De Civili Dominio which showed him, as the late Prof. Thorold Rogers pointed out, to be well acquainted with the principle of the telescope:—"Sicut enim, juxta perspectives, contingit per specula vel media diversarum dyafanitatum, quantumlibet parvum per quantamcunque magnam distanciam apparere ex elargicione anguli piramidis radialis: ita contingit fide videre ea quae sunt in principio mundi et die judicii ex fideli narracione fidelium sibi succedencium tarn disparium fidei speculorum."
