of the Catholic faith.  “When he questioned the priestly power of absolution and the Pope’s authority in purgatory, when he struck at indulgences and special masses, he had on his side the spiritual instincts of the people;” but when he impugned the dignity of the central act of Christian worship and the highest expression of mystical devotion, it appeared to ordinary minds that he was denying all that is sacred, impressive, and authoritative in the sacrament itself,—­and he gave offence to many devout minds, who had approved his attacks on the monks and the various corruptions of the Church.  Even the Parliament pressed the Archbishop to make an end of such a heresy; and Courtenay, who hated Wyclif, needed not to be urged.  So a council was assembled at the Dominican Convent at Blackfriars, where the “Times” office now stands, and unanimously condemned not only the opinions of Wyclif as to the eucharist, but also those in reference to the power of excommunication, and the uselessness of the religious orders.  Yet he himself was allowed to escape; and the condemnation had no other effect than to drive him from Oxford to his rectory at Lutterworth, where until his death he occupied himself in literary and controversial writings.  His illness soon afterwards prevented him from obeying the summons of the Pope to Rome, where he would doubtless have suffered as a martyr.  In 1384 he was struck with paralysis, and died in three days after the attack, at the age of sixty,—­though some say in his sixty-fourth year,—­probably, in spite of ecclesiastical censure, the most revered man of his day, as well as one of the ablest and most learned.  Not from the ranks of fanatics or illiterate popular orators did the Reformation come in any country, but from the greatest scholars and theologians.

This grand old man, the illustrious pioneer of reform in England, and indeed on the Continent, did not live to threescore years and ten, but, being worn out with his exhaustive labors, he died peaceably and unmolested in his retired parish.  Not much is known of the details of his personal history, any more than of Shakspeare’s.  We know nothing of his loves and hatreds, of his habits and tastes, of his temper and person, of his friends and enemies.  He stands out to the eye of posterity in solitary and mysterious loneliness.  Tradition speaks of him as a successful, benignant, and charitable parish priest, giving consolation to the afflicted and to the sick.  He lived in honor,—­professor of theology at Oxford, holding a prebendal stall and a parochial rectory, perhaps a seat in Parliament, and was employed by the Crown as an ambassador to Bruges.  He was statesman as well as theologian, and lived among the great,—­more as a learned doctor than as a saint, which he was not from the Catholic standpoint.  “He was the scourge of imposture, the ponderous hammer which smote the brazen idolatry of his age.”  He labored to expose the vices that had taken shelter in the sanctuary of the Church,—­a reformer