the Catholic Church has hated, it is private judgment.  The very phrase is obnoxious.  It means the emancipation of the people from papal domination and ecclesiastical bondage of all description; while the thing itself is subversive of all the claims which the Catholic hierarchy have ever put forth as to the authority of the Church as an institution:  it has undermined and will continue to undermine spiritual despotism,—­the great evil of the Middle Ages and of the Papal Church in our times.  The unrestrained circulation of the Scriptures in the language the people can understand must lead to the breaking up of the false doctrines and all the instruments by which the clergy have maintained their usurpations.  It necessarily opens the eyes of the people to the antichristian doctrine of penance, to the absurdity of indulgences for sin, to the unwarranted worship of the Virgin Mary, to the monstrous claim of papal infallibility, and to all other glaring usurpations by which the popes have ruled the world.  There is not a false doctrine in religion, nor an antichristian form of worship, nor a usurped prerogative of the Pope and clergy, which the unrestrained perusal of the Scriptures does not expose. “Hinc illae lacrymae.”  The dignitaries of the Roman Catholic Church are not fools.  They know that the free circulation of the Scriptures in vulgar tongues does undermine their authority, and will ultimately destroy the edifice of pride and pomp and power which it took a thousand years to build.  This is what they ever have consistently opposed and will continue to oppose, as a thing dangerous to them.  They would have destroyed, if they could, every copy of the version which Wyclif made.  And now, when they can no longer prevent the Bible from being printed, they would exclude it from the schools which they control, and from the houses of those who belong to their Church.  Doubtless the well-known opposition to the circulation of the Bible in the vernacular has been exaggerated, but in the fourteenth century it was certainly bitter and furious.  Wyclif might expose vices which everybody saw and lamented as a scandal, and make himself obnoxious to those who committed them; but to open the door to free inquiry and a reformed faith and hostility to the Pope,—­this was a graver offence, to be visited with the severest penalties.  To the storm of indignation thus raised against him Wyclif’s only answer was:  “The clergy cry aloud that it is heresy to speak of the Holy Scriptures in English, and so they would condemn the Holy Ghost, who gave tongues to the Apostles of Christ to speak the Word of God in all languages under heaven.”

Notwithstanding the enormous cost of the Bible as translated by Wyclif,—­L2, 16s. 8d., a sum probably equal to thirty pounds, or one hundred and fifty dollars of our present money, more than half the annual income of a substantial yeoman,—­still it was copied and circulated with remarkable rapidity.  Neither the cost of the valuable manuscript nor the opposition and vigilance of an almost omnipresent inquisition were able to suppress it.