Wyclif was now about fifty-eight years of age.  He had rendered a transcendent service to the English nation, and a service that not one of his contemporaries could have performed,—­to which only the foremost scholar and theologian of his day was equal.  After such a work he might have reposed in his quiet parish in genial rest, conscious that he had opened a new era in the history of his country.  But rest was not for him.  He now appears as a doctrinal controversialist.  Hitherto his attacks had been against the flagrant external evils of the Church, the enormous corruptions that had entered into the institutions which sustained the papal power.  “He had been the advocate of the University in defence of her privileges, the champion of the Crown in vindication of its rights and prerogatives, the friend of the people in the preservation of their property....  He now assailed the Romish doctrine of the eucharist,” but without the support of those powerful princes and nobles who had hitherto sustained him.  He combats one of the prevailing ideas of the age,—­a more difficult and infinitely bolder thing,—­which theologians had not dared to assail, and which in after-times was a stumbling-block to Luther himself.  In ascending the mysterious mount where clouds gathered around him his old friends began to desert him, for now he assailed the awful and invisible.  The Church of the Middle Ages had asserted that the body of Christ was actually present in the consecrated wafer, and few there were who doubted it.  Berengar had maintained in the eleventh century that the sacred elements should be regarded as mere symbols; but he was vehemently opposed, with all the terrors of spiritual power, and compelled to abjure the heresy.  In the year 1215, at a Lateran, Council, Innocent III. established the doctrine of transubstantiation as one of the fundamental pillars of Catholic belief.  Then metaphysics—­all the weapons of Scholasticism—­were called into the service of superstition to establish what is most mythical in the creed of the Church, and which implied a perpetual miracle, since at the moment of consecration the substance of the bread was taken away and the substance of Christ’s body took its place.  From his chair of theology at Oxford, in 1381, Wyclif attacked what Lanfranc and Anselm and the doctors of the Church had uniformly and strenuously defended.  His views of the eucharist were substantially those which Archbishop Berengar had advanced three hundred years before, and of course drew down upon him the censure of the Church.  In his peril he appealed, not to the Pope or the clergy, but to the King himself,—­a measure of renewed audacity, for in those days no layman, however exalted, had authority in matters purely ecclesiastical.  His boldness was too much even for the powerful Duke of Lancaster, his friend and patron, who forbade him to speak further on such a matter.  He might attack the mendicant and itinerant friars who had forgotten their duties and their vows, but not the great mysteries