taxes paid to the pope equalled in amount five times the sum paid to the crown of England itself! The church. had thus become, as has been well said, "but the vast conduit or instrument of suction by which the money was drawn from the country."

Now it became evident that if England would continue to exist as a separate power, if it would not be swallowed in the vortex which centred in Rome, it must put a curb on the aggressions of the papacy. The question whether resistance should be shown to the Roman church was with England, at this period, not so much a matter of right, of sound doctrine, of ecclesiastical polity, as a question of self-preservation. And in fact it had not so much as occurred to the statesmen of that age who counselled resistance to Rome, to doubt the spiritual supremacy of the pope, or the soundness of the papal dogmas, or the indispensableness of the papal ceremonies. All these points were conceded as matters of course. Whether the profound men of that time distinguished between the civil and the ecclesiastical functions of the popes, is a disputed point. The probability is that they did not care to be logically consistent in their opposition to popish aggression. They were Englishmen, and loved their king and country, and as the identical existence of England as a nation was at stake, they took a position as patriots, and resisted the extreme claims of the pope; and all this, we may presume, without stopping to see how far such resistance was consistent with that spiritual supremacy of the church which they so unhesitatingly conceded.

It will, however, be observed that whatever of Protestantism appears in the attempt of the English statesmen of the fourteenth century to resist the money exactions of the Roman pontiffs, has no higher merit than that of patri otism-a genuine merit indeed, but at the same time involving none of those spiritual qualities which enter so largely into the modern idea of Protestantism. On the score of doctrine and polity, then, we can give the Englishmen no credit, who, nevertheless, really inaugurated the Protestant reformation. They thought to benefit only themselves, not the world at large. They sought the self

1 Pictorial History of England.

preservation of England, not the spiritual emancipation of humanity. In their first conflict with the papacy, we need recognize only the hand of Providence, whereby the wise were caught in their own craftiness, and the patriotic statesmen of England, building wiser than they knew, set on foot a movement, the end whereof it would most likely have terrified them to anticipate.

Before proceeding to the particular events in which the Protestant character of the resistance to papal aggression distinctively appears, we must briefly call attention to one of the religious orders of the period, whose indiscreet zeal for the pope proved the occasion of materially assisting the movement they thought to crush. We allude to the Mendicant Friars-an order founded in the early part of the thirteenth century, and which plays a most conspicuous part in the religious history of this and the century succeeding. The mendicants, or as they are commonly called, the "begging friars," as their name indicates, were bound by their profession to a life of poverty; and in the early part of their career they were rigidly true to their profession. Subsisting entirely upon the charities that were proffered them, all that came into their possession above what sufficed for their humble support, went into the treasury of the church. The austerity of their lives, their unparalleled earnestness as the devotees of the church, the entire disinterestedness with which they sacrificed earthly comfort, health, the honors of this world, and, if occasion called, life itself, all to advance what they, in their early career, unquestionably believed to be the cause of God, had the natural effect upon the hearts of an excitable and superstitious people. The wealth, the cupidity, the pomp and luxury, the strife for worldly honor and worldly rewards, which characterized the regular clergy of that time, were contrasted with the meekness, the simplicity of manners, the devotedness to their sacred calling, the poverty and hardships of the new order. The enthusiasm in their favor became almost universal; and in a wonderfully short time the mass of the people had forsaken the regular priests and monks, for the instruction and the spiritual lead of the mendicants. We must add, in this connection, that the mendicants, being the most devoted and efficient of the servants of the pope, had a

papal permission to encroach at will on the parishes of the regular priests-responsible for their manner of discharg ing the offices of religion directly to the pope, and in no sense, like the other clergy, to the bishops or other officers of the ecclesiastical establishment.

It did indeed happen to the mendicant order, as to all human organizations, that in a short time its profession of poverty and humility became but a profession. By vari ous arts evading the obligations of their vows, they became the boon companions of lords and nobles, and aspired to high dignities in the church, and to the most lucrative offices in the government, and fared sumptuously. Nevertheless, they had not in the fourteenth century lost their hold upon the popular heart, though the want of agreement between their professions and their practices were glaring; and though the general confidence in their sincerity was shaken, they still contrasted favorably with the regular clergy, and continued to rival them successfully in the good will of the people.

We hardly need state, what nearly every one's observation of the weakness of human nature already anticipates, that to the patriotic resistance of the papal exaction before stated, was now added another occasion favorable to successful antagonism to the church-the jealousies and rivalries which sprung up between the regular clergy and the mendicant friars. Both of those orders were the emissaries of the pope. But their respective interests clashed. Jealousies and bitter recriminations were the result. household of the papacy was divided against itself. In the ultimate protestant fruits of the struggle, we have an historical exemplification of that order of providence, whereby, in the long result, the wrath of man is made to praise the Lord.

The

We come now to an event which marks an epoch in Protestant history-the birth of an individual in whom the true protestant idea was destined to find, the age considered, a wonderfully complete embodiment; and through whose sagacious efforts the patriotism which resisted papal cupidity, and the antagonism which separated the religious orders, were made the prolific soil in which the seeds of a genuine protestantism, a spiritual emancipation, were to take deep root.

John Wickliffe was born in Yorkshire, one of the northern counties of England, in the year 1324. He removed to Oxford in 1340, where he became a distinguished scholar in Queen's College, and at a later period a fellow of Merton College. In 1365 he was appointed Overseer of Canterbury Hall, a college connected with Oxford University-a place which he was permitted to fill four years. As a priest and a man of letters he stood high in the regards of his contemporaries; and his position at the University is sufficient assurance that he ranked with the ripest scholastics of his time, and his writings prove that he was the foremost dialectician. A genuine Englishman in the practical bent of his mind, he had an eye to the abuses which in his time made the services of religion a mockery, and the mendicant emissaries of the pope a pest; at the same time endowed with vigorous speculative faculties, he was prompted to correct abuses by appealing to principles rather than precedents; withal possessing a rare shrewdness for one so ardent and impulsive in his temperament, he was enabled to single out the weak points of his antagonists, and do the work of a reformer without incurring the honors of martyrdom. History2 mentions among the predecessors of Wickliffe the name of Robert Grosshead, Roger Bacon, and Richard Armagh, in whose writings the principles of reform found a fragmentary expression. But in the person of John Wickliffe, these principles took form and consistency; and though evidently indebted to the writings of the individuals named, he is perhaps justly entitled to rank in history as the Father of Protestantism.

The first appearance of Wickliffe in the character of a reformer, does not appear to have been entirely voluntary on his part, but grew out of his acceptance of an invitation to dispute certain pretensions of the mendicant friars. We have already explained the fact that a bitter rivalry had sprung up between the friars and the regular clergy. As a member of the latter order, Wickliffe was, by position we may say, an antagonist of the friars. In the course of a controversy which had been carried on between the rival orders, the friars put forth the proposition, that Christ and his apostles subsisted upon charity, and had thereby sanctioned by example a leading characteris

2 Neander's Church History..

tic of their profession-that is to say, as a begging clergy they were but imitating the practice of the Master and his chosen ministry! This singular argument was thought worthy of a formal refutation; and Wickliffe, conspicuous at the University for his learning and polemic skill, was selected as the champion of his party to meet the point at issue.

Now in all this there was nothing necessarily antagonist to the Roman church. It had not occured to him, as yet, to call in question any essential dogma or pretension of this church. But it so happened that in conducting the refutation of the proposition of the friars, he, as it were, stumbled upon arguments the logical sequence of which he had not anticipated, but which, once lodged in his mind, gradually moulded his thoughts and directed his reasonings, till in the end they were the means of bringing him into antagonism not only with the friars, but with the whole ecclesiastical body-with the essential pretensions of the pope himself. We need not give the particulars of this unexpected result in the mind of Wickliffe. It is sufficient to say, that following the direction of his speculative tendencies of intellect, instead of appealing to precedents, the usual custom, he made his appeal to principles-those principles of truth and right which are patent to the intuitive gaze. We need not say, that whoever attacks a particular error on such grounds will be continually surprised at the new errors which call for the application of the same remedies. The result of Wickliffe's conflict with the friars was highly satisfactory to his party; but the full internal results were not suspected by his friends, probably not by himself.

But occasion soon called Wickliffe into contact with a more formidable party than the begging clergy. We have already alluded to the stipulation made by King John, binding the kingdom to an annual tribute as a fief of the Roman see, and we have stated the fact that, though occasionally paid, it was finally wholly withheld. In 1365 Pope Urban V. revived the claim, at the same time insisting on the full arrears reaching back a period of thirty years! Several circumstances combined to make this an unfortunate move on the part of the pontiff, and in the end every way fortunate to the kingdom.