seek no strange English but easiest and commonest and such that is most like to the Latin. . . . In the translation I follow the letter as much as I may, and where I find no proper English I follow the wit of the words, so that those that shall read it need not dread erring. In expounding I follow holy Doctors, and reason: reproving sin." Praiseworthy as Rolle's aim was, he was only able to fulfil it with reference to a small portion of Scripture, while it must be kept clearly in view that in what he did accomplish, he along with his predecessors was thinking of the convenience of the clergy rather than of the needs of the common people. The very idea of a people's Bible does not seem yet to have occurred to any one. It is the more striking that within forty years from this time the whole Bible was actually translated into English with the express design of its becoming the common property of the nation. The man to whom this was due, and who in consequence ranks as the first of our Bible translators, was John Wycliffe. CHAPTER II JOHN WYCLIFFE 1. Wycliffe's early years. 2. Embassy to Bruges. Wycliffe's times. 4. Work of translation. upon Wycliffe. 6. His death. 3. 5. Attacks § 1. Wycliffe's early Years.-John Wycliffe1 was born about the year 1320 in the vicinity of Richmond in Yorkshire. Of his early years very little is known, but after the year 1356 we find him filling various important offices at the University of Oxford. In 1361 he was appointed by his college to the rectory of Fylingham in Lincolnshire, and a few years later exchanged this for Ludgershall in Buckinghamshire. He did not however abandon his connection with Oxford, but continued to deliver lectures on Philosophy and Logic, and later on Theology, distinguished by a learning and a zeal which led to his being known amongst his contemporaries by the prophetic title of "the Evangelical Doctor." It was indeed to his intimate knowledge of the Scriptures that Wycliffe owed even then his scholastic fame, though there is no evidence that up to this time he had ever thought of what was to be the crowning glory of his life-his translation of them into English. Nor as yet had he any open quarrel with Rome; for the statement, frequently found in histories of the Bible, that so early as 1360 he had come forward with attacks upon the monastic system, is wholly without foundation.2 1 The name is spelt in nearly thirty different ways. 2 Cf. Lechler, John Wycliffe and his English Precursors, p. 120 (1 vol. edition by Lorimer). § 2. Embassy to Bruges.-When however the opportunity for action came, Wycliffe was not found wanting. In 1365 Pope Urban V. had renewed his claim upon England for the payment of a thousand marks, as the feudatory tribute which had been exacted from King John in 1213, but which had fallen into arrear for a period of thirty-three years. This claim King Edward III. and his Parliament unanimously refused to concede, and amongst other publications of the time supporting their action was a tract by Wycliffe, setting forth the rights of Parliament on this question. The part he thus took in a controversy of such national importance, as well as the position which he occupied as one of the King's chaplains, led to Edward's selecting "our beloved and faithful master John de Wiclif" as one of the royal commissioners sent to Bruges in 1374 to treat with the Papal Nuncio regarding the reservation of benefices. The question was at the time a burning one in England. During a period, dating back again to King John, the Popes of Rome had claimed the right to traffic in English benefices; and the consequence was that many important livings had been gifted to strangers and absentees, whose sole interest in them consisted in drawing the revenues, as if "God had given His sheep not to be pastured, but to be shaven and shorn." The Conference ended, as conferences frequently do, in a compromise; but upon Wycliffe's mind the proceedings produced an effect which has been often compared with the effect in later days upon Luther of his visit to Rome, and which certainly proved itself to be attended with far-reaching consequences. Hitherto his opposition to Rome had been conducted principally, if not wholly, on national and patriotic grounds; but from this time he comes before us rather in the light of an ecclesiastical reformer-" the Morning Star of the Reformation." § 3. Wycliffe's Times.-The need of reform, it is certain, must have been daily pressing itself on Wycliffe's mind. The age in which he lived was a very dark age. General social distress existed not only at home, but throughout the Continent; while in England the Black Death, or Pestilence, swept repeatedly over the country, carrying off on its first outbreak no less than half the population. Meanwhile the church was corrupt, the clergy ignorant, and the people neglected; and to crown all, in 1378 came the scandal of the Great Schism, two rival Popes at Rome and at Avignon anathematising one another. And yet out of all this evil good was to come. "The unsettledness of the period," says Dr. Eadie, "with its bitter strifes, the rooted enmity of class against class, the hardheartedness of statesmen, and the ambitious factions of Churchmen with their worldliness and intrigues, impressed Wycliffe with the indelible conviction that all ranks needed to know and study the Divine Word in the tongue intelligible to them."1 Many quotations from Wycliffe's own writings might be brought forward to substantiate this; but a single sentence from his preface to an English translation of a Latin Harmony of the Gospels must suffice: "Christian men ought much to travail night and day about text of Holy Writ, and namely [especially] the Gospel in their mother tongue, since Jesus Christ, very God and very man, taught this Gospel with His own blessed mouth and kept it in His life," § 4. Work of Translation.—Wycliffe began accordingly with a translation of the Apocalypse, in whose mingled denunciation of sin and comfort in suffering he must have seen so fitting a message for his own time. The Gospels with a commentary came next, that "with God's grace poor Christian men may some deal [partly] know the text of the Gospel and therein know the meek and pure and charitable living of Christ and His Apostles, to sue [follow] them in virtues and bliss." Other books followed, until probably in 1380 the whole New Testament was completed. To this was shortly added a translation of the Old Testament, principally by one of his friends, Nicolas de Hereford, so that by the 1 The English Bible, vol. i. pp. 55-6. middle of the year 1382 Wycliffe had the joy of seeing the whole Scriptures in the hands of the people "in their mother tongue." § 5. Attacks upon Wycliffe.-All this, it must be remembered, was not accomplished without difficulty and even danger. Hereford was cited before the Synod in London in 1382, and had afterwards to leave the country; while Wycliffe's own life was one long struggle against the attacks of Rome. Foxe has preserved a lively account of a meeting of Convocation in 1377 from which he only escaped through the intervention of the Duke of Lancaster; while a second attempt against him at Lambeth about a year later was frustrated by the intervention of the widowed Princess of Wales. How bitter indeed was the hostility with which he was regarded is proved by a well-known incident--one of the few glimpses we have into the personal life of the reformer. In 1379 while discharging his annual duty at Oxford as a divinity Professor he was seized with an alarming illness. Four friars, believing that his end was near, contrived to get admission into his sickroom, and called upon him as a dying man to retract all that he had said against their order. But Wycliffe was not to be daunted. With the aid of his servant he raised himself on his pillow, and with all the strength he could command exclaimed: "I shall not die, but live to declare the evil deeds of the friars." And confused and confounded the friars left the room. A year or two later the determined hostility of the Church was proved by the public condemnation of Wycliffe's teaching at a synod held at the Dominican Monastery in Blackfriars, London, when however the reformer himself was not present. A terrible earthquake which occurred during the sittings of the Synod, and threatened at one time to break them up, was ingeni 1 An interesting proof of this is afforded by what is believed to be the original MS. of his work preserved in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and which breaks off suddenly after the second word of Baruch iii. 20 |