But Wyclif, it would seem, was distinguished for his attainments in everything which commanded the admiration of his age.  In 1356, when he was thirty-two, he wrote a tract on the last ages of the Church, in view of the wretchedness produced by the great plague eight years before.  In 1360, at the age of thirty-six, he attacked the Mendicant orders, and his career as a reformer began,—­an unsuccessful reformer, indeed, like John Huss, since the evils which he combated were not removed.  He merely protested against the corruptions which good men lamented; and that is nearly all that great men can do when they are beyond their age.  They are simply witnesses of truth, and fortunate are they if they do not die as martyrs; for in the early Church “witnesses” and “martyrs” were synonymous ([Greek:  martyres]).  The year following, 1361, Wyclif was presented to the rich rectory of Fillingham by Baliol College, and was promoted the same year to the wardenship of that ancient college.  The learned doctor is now one of the “dons” of the university,—­at that time, even more than now, a great dignitary.  It would be difficult for an unlearned politician of the nineteenth century to conceive of the exalted position which a dignitary of the Church, crowned with scholastic honors, held five hundred years ago.  It gave him access to the table of his sovereign, and to the halls of Parliament.  It made him an oracle in all matters of the law.  It created for him a hearing on all the great political as well as ecclesiastical issues of the day.  What great authorities in the thirteenth century were Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and Bonaventura!  Scarcely less than they, in the next century, were Duns Scotus and John Wyclif,—­far greater in influence than any of the proud feudal lords who rendered service to Edward III., broad as were their acres, and grand as were their castles.  Strange as it may seem, the glory that radiated from the brow of a scholar or a saint was greatest in ages of superstition and darkness; perhaps because both scholars and saints were rare.  The modern lights of learning may be better paid than in former days, but they do not stand out to the eye of admiring communities in such prominence as they did among our ancestors.  Who stops and turns back to gaze reverentially on a poet or a scholar whom he passes by unconsciously, as both men and women strained their eyes to see an Abelard or a Dante?  Even a Webster now would not command the homage he received fifty years ago.

It is not uninteresting to contemplate the powers that have ruled in successive ages, outside the realms of conquerors and kings.  In the ninth and tenth centuries they were baronial lords in mail-clad armor; in the eleventh and twelfth centuries these powers, like those of ancient Egypt, were priests; in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries they were the learned doctors, as in the schools of Athens when political supremacy was lost; in the sixteenth century—­the