of ecclesiastical abuses rather than of the lax morals of the laity, and hence did different work from that of Savonarola, whose life was spent in a crusade against sin, wherever it was to be found.  His labors were great, and his attainments remarkable for his age.  He is accused of being coarse in his invectives; but that charge can also be laid to Luther and other reformers in rough and outspoken times.  Considering the power of the Pope in the fourteenth century, Wyclif was as bold and courageous as Luther.  The weakness of the papacy had not been exposed by the Councils of Pisa, of Constance, and of Basil; nor was popular indignation in view of the sale of indulgences as great in England as when the Dominican Tetzel peddled the papal pardons in Germany.  In combating the received ideas of the age, Wyclif was even more remarkable than the Saxon reformer, who was never fully emancipated from the Mediaeval doctrine of transubstantiation; although Luther went beyond Wyclif in the completeness of his reform.  Wyclif was beyond his age; Luther was the impersonation of its passions.  Wyclif represented universities and learned men; Luther was the oracle of the people.  The former was the Mediaeval doctor; the latter was the popular orator and preacher.  The one was mild and moderate in his spirit and manners; the other was vehement, dogmatic, and often offensive, not only from his more violent and passionate nature, but for his bitter and ironical sallies.  It is the manner more than the matter which offends.  Had Wyclif been as satirical and boisterous as Luther was, he would not probably have ended his days in peace, and would not have accomplished so much as a preparation for reforms.

It was the peculiarity of Wyclif to recognize occasional merits in the system he denounced, even when his language was most vehement.  He admitted that confession did much good to some persons, although as a universal practice, as enjoined by Innocent III., it was an evil and harmed the Church.  In regard to the worship of images, while he denounced the waste of treasure on “dead stocks,” he admitted that images might be used as aids to excite devotion; but if miraculous powers were attributed to them, it was an evil rather than a good.  And as to the adoration of the saints, he simply maintained that since gifts can be obtained only through the mediation of Christ, it would be better to pray to him directly rather than through the mediation of saints.

In regard to the Mendicant friars, it does not appear that his vehement opposition to them was based on their vows of poverty or on the spirit which entered into monasticism in its best ages, but because they were untrue to their rule, because they were vendors of pardons, and absolved men of sins which they were ashamed to confess to their own pastors, and especially because they encouraged the belief that a benefaction to a convent would take the place of piety in the heart.  It was the abuses of the system, rather than the system