them addressed to the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London, one to the King, and one to the University of Oxford, denouncing Wycliffe as a heretic, and calling for his commitment to prison. This led to the famous Synod at Lambeth in April, before which Wycliffe is said, by his enemies, to have answered feebly and evasively to the charges. entered against him; as though he quailed in the presence of his ecclesiastical superiors, and dared not say at Lambeth what he had said so often, and in so many forms, at Oxford. The charge is false. Wycliffe understood himself, and his judges, and the occasion. It was not a popular harangue that was called for, discussing all the matters at issue between the Church and himself as a theologian and a Christian. It was mainly the question of Papal authority, or, wider still, of ecclesiastical authority, in its relation to the authority of the civil power. It was the original question of jurisdiction; and Wycliffe chose to handle it with precision and subtlety as a schoolman. We may be tempted to regret that he did not bear himself more loftily in the defence, taking a wider range, and striking a blow which would have resounded through Europe, and through the ages; but there certainly was no faltering or feebleness. The glove was of velvet, but the hand it covered was as firm as hammered steel. Retracting nothing he had ever uttered, he propounded principles which, logically, made an end of the Papal Hierarchy. To theologians, diplomatists, and scholars, it was palpable enough, that he and Rome were parting company.

The Synod had no authority given it to visit Wycliffe with pains and penalties, and, if it had, would hardly have dared to use it, such was the attitude of the English government, and such the temper of the people, towards him. It therefore only rebuked him for his heresies, and charged him not to promulgate them any more, either in the pulpit or the schools. The result was a sort of victory for Wycliffe, but victory only in a preparatory skirmish; the battle was yet to come. No bolt had fallen, but the cloud was over him, and lightning was in it.

In this state of the case, while awaiting the action of the

Papal Court, Wycliffe prepares a second document, in which he makes his appeal to the Christian public, touching the points at issue. In this document, for obvious reasons, his language is bolder than it was at Lambeth. The infallibility of the Pope, clerical power of absolution, and the authority of the Church in temporal things, he denounces as "Luciferian,” and avows himself ready to defend the positions he has taken, "even to the death, if by such means he might reform the manners of the Church."

But the excitement occasioned by such a struggle proves too severe for his slender frame, and his nervous system gives out under it. Near the beginning of 1379, a violent sickness falls upon him, and carries him down to the brink of the grave. Tradition, so nearly silent in regard to all personal matters pertaining to Wycliffe, has handed down a report of one scene in the sick man's chamber, minute and vivid enough for an artist's pencil. Four doctors, called regents, representing the four orders of Friars, informed of the probably fatal nature of his disease, take with them four aldermen of the city, and hasten to his bedside, to extort from him a dying confession of the injustice he has done the Mendicants in his war against them. Wycliffe lies silent till they have finished what they had to say, then beckoning to his servant to raise him on his pillow, he fixes his eyes on the astonished group, and exclaims, with all his remaining strength, "I shall not die, but live, and again declare the evil deeds of the Friars." The deputation depart discomfited, and Wycliffe is shortly on his feet again, more resolute than ever against the unscriptural assumptions of the Hierarchy.

But a battalion of Wycliffes, launched all at once upon Christendom, could not have done so much to damage the Roman Church as she was now doing to damage herself. Close on the heels of her return from the Avignon exile, the great schism occurred, commencing in 1378, and continuing for nearly forty years, during which Pope fulminated against Pope, to the boundless distress and distraction of all honest and godly men. It was this confusion at home, which hindered proceedings

against heresy abroad. And so Wycliffe went down to the grave, if not in peace, yet by the visitation of natural disease, and with his clerical robes upon him; stricken as he was ministering at the altar.

At first, and throughout the greater part of his career, the attacks of Wycliffe had been directed principally against certain palpable enormities of the Papal usurpation. He had stood forth as the champion of the University, the crown, and the people, vindicating their possessions, rights, and prerogatives, against robbery and insolent dictation. Early in 1381, he changed his tactics, turned his thoughts more towards doctrine, and challenged the members of the University to a public discussion of the dogma of transubstantiation. This challenge was not accepted. His opponents dared not meet him in debate. Instead of debate, they gave him sentence of condemnation. The Chancellor of the University and twelve doctors, in solemn conclave assembled, passed judgment upon him as a heretic for denying the bodily presence of Christ in the Supper, and declared that if any one, of whatever degree, state, or condition, should in future publicly teach this heresy, either in the schools or out of them, he should be suspended from all scholastic exercises, should be subjected to the "greater excommunication," and should be imprisoned.

This decree was brought to Wycliffe in the lecture-room, where he sat discoursing to his pupils. His enemies say, that he betrayed some confusion as he listened to the reading of the paper. But if so, it was only momentary, for no sooner was the reading of it finished, than he protested against the injustice of the procedure, and said he should take his appeal to Cæsar. For the present, however, he can only submit to the powers that be, and take his leave of the University, whose Chancellor has commanded him to shut his mouth.

He departs, accordingly, for Lutterworth, beyond the jurisdiction of the Chancellor, and there, in the pulpit and in his study, with voice and pen put to an activity at which we marvel, enters upon the last grand stadium of his eventful and stormy career. These last four years were crowded with

gigantic labors. Nothing but a divine fire shut up in his bones could have carried him through such labors, nearly sixty years of age, as he then was, and greatly worn by sickness, study, care, and sorrow. He preached to his plain rural congregation, bringing down the wealth and power of his genius to their capacities and wants; he showered England with tracts and treatises, having written enough to fill four or five folio volumes; and, most important of all, he translated the entire Bible, or caused it to be translated, into the English tongue. The Duke of Lancaster, it is true, abandons him, when he comes to turn from the more political to the more doctrinal and spiritual phase of his work. But the dauntless man holds on his way undiscouraged. Persecution arises against his followers, particularly against his "poor priests," with the network of whose activity, like Wesley after him, he has covered the land; but, for one reason and another, the storm spares him. And so he strides and struggles on, his outward man perishing, but the inward man renewed day by day; his zeal for Christ, his love for man, and his faith in the final victory of right and truth, growing stronger and stronger, till, on the 29th of December, 1384, in the chancel of his church at Lutterworth, during the celebration of mass, just about the time for the elevation of the host, he was stricken speechless with paralysis, and two days afterwards yielded up his spirit unto God. Underneath the pavement of the chancel, devout men laid the Reformer to his rest. In 1428, as decreed by the Council of Constance thirteen years before, those sacred relics were disinterred, and reduced to ashes; and then the ashes were thrown into the river Swift, which, as Fuller says, "conveyed them into the Avon, the Avon into the Severn, and Severn into the narrow seas, they to the main ocean. And thus the ashes of Wycliffe are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the world over."

Of Wycliffe's character, and the fruits of his labors, immediate and remote,—of his writings, printed and in manuscript,— and of his theological opinions, there is now no room to speak. These topics may possibly be treated in another Number.

ARTICLE II.

THE SETTLEMENT OF MARYLAND.

THE elements of civil and religious liberty, which are supposed to constitute the peculiar glory of our times, are all contained in the laws of the Hebrew people, given by divine direction more than three thousand years ago. These laws are as

follows:

"One law shall be to him that is home-born, and unto the

stranger that sojourneth among you." "And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him. But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born amongst you, and thou shalt love him as thyself: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt." "One ordinance shall be both for you of the congregation, and also for the stranger that sojourneth with you, an ordinance forever in your generations; as ye are, so shall the stranger be before the Lord. One law, and one manner shall be for you, and for the stranger that sojourneth with you."*

These laws were uttered long before any principles of freedom were wrought out in the states of Greece, and were producing their silent effects centuries before those states had an existence. It is true that they do not contain all that we suppose to enter into just notions of liberty and equality; it is true that the laws of the Hebrew people did not make provision to permit the worship of any other than the true God; it is true that there was not contemplated in the commonwealth the existence of polytheism or any form of idolatry; but it is also true that these laws contain what Lord Bacon would call "seeds of thought" on political subjects, the elementary doctrines which, in all ages, must be laid at the foundation of liberty. The great principle of freedom involved essential equality between the home-born and the stranger. The stranger,—the foreigner,—was to be admitted freely to share the

* Ex. xii, 49. Lev. xix, 33, 4. Numb. xv, 15, 16.