CHAPTER II. JOHN WYCLIFFE. THE latter half of the fourteenth century is memorable in the history of popular freedom. The monopolies of the favored classes were challenged by the people as never before. Italy saw the brief but splendid resistance to the nobles led by Rienzi, "consul of orphans, widows, and the poor.' In France, the peasants sublimed to power by despair, and stimulated alike by hunger and oppression rose against their lords, firing their castles and murdering their wives and children. The passionate appeal against brutal tyranny which culminated in England in the revolt of Wat Tyler was smouldering long years before. The country was suffering from famine and plague, and her best blood was drained by her wars. How long she could endure, and whether indeed the world itself was not near its end, were questions on many lips. The time, so many thought, must be at hand when the Judge would come, if he were not already at the gate To terminate the evil, To diadem the right. A. D. 1320-1384. To this England John Wycliffe addressed himself as the consciousness of his powers and obligations grew upon him. Although born in 1320, near Richmond in Yorkshire, and not far from the village which still bears his name, he matured slowly. Nothing distinguishes him more than the self-possession with which he moves among the troublous elements that he was mastering and controlling for God and merrie England." From his peaceful mastership of Balliol College, Oxford, he “leaned out his soul and listened." Everywhere he saw civil commotion and ecclesiastical change. The papacy rent by internal disputes was ill prepared for resisting the growing spirit of revolt in England, whose people would no more brook a foreign usurpation of their consciences than they would brook a foreign invasion of their soil. In 1356, he began the work which has made him famous, by translating the Apocalypse, perhaps attracted to that book, as was Savonarola in the next century, by the apparent fulfillment of its prophecies in his own land and age. This was followed by the Gospels with a commentary; and by 1380 he had translated the whole New Testament, including a revision of the Apocalypse. Wycliffe was now sixty years old, but it seemed as though he had lived many lives since his public course began. As a statesman, he had supported his sovereign in his resistance to the pope, and had incurred popular disfavor for a time by his attachment to John of Gaunt, the most powerful noble of his day. As a reformer, he had stimulated the revolt of the people against the oppression of their superiors, and was charged with giving John Ball, the mad priest of Kent, his most powerful arguments when he inquired in his homely way: When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman ? Since 1361 he had been a parish minister, incessant in his labors for the welfare of his charge. Almost a quarter of a century he had given to the work of translating, and throughout a period of like duration he had been evangelizing England, and by means of the itinerant toils of his "poor preachers" spreading his doctrines broadcast over the land. The Old Testament was added to the New in 1384. Apparently it was begun by Wycliffe's friend and disciple, Nicholas de Hereford, who proceeded as far as Baruch 3: 20, when he was forced to lay down his pen at the beginning of the verse by a summons to appear before a synod of preaching friars, and at their instigation was excommunicated.' He escaped, and returned from Rome to England, but not in time to see his old master. Probably Wycliffe himself finished the work begun by Nicholas de A.D. 1382. 1 Eadie, Vol. I., p. 64. Stoughton, p. 33, Hereford. However that may have been, the translation of the Bible completed in 1384 was substantially the work of John Wycliffe. It was finished only just in time, for on the 28th of December he was stricken with paralysis while hearing service in his own church of Lutterworth, and died as the new year was coming in. Wycliffe's version was made from the Latin Vulgate, and from the impure text current in his time. Within a few years of his death his followers became so conscious of its defects, that one of the foremost of them, John Purvey, a fellow-sufferer with Nicholas de Hereford, prepared a A.D. 1388. complete revision which was issued in 1388. "A simple creature," he says of himself, "hath translated the Bible out of Latin into English." His quaint account of his method suggests some of the soundest principles controlling any translation: First, this "simple creature" had much travail with divers fellows and helpers to gather many old Bibles, and other doctors and common glosses, and to make one common Bible some deal true; and then to study it of the new, the text with the gloss and other doctors as he might get, and specially Lyra on the Old Testament, that helped him full much in this work; the third time, to counsel with old grammarians and old divines of hard words, senses, how they might best be understood and translated; the fourth time, |