he would doubtless have suffered death from their animosity; but he was left unmolested in his retirement at his rectory, although he kept himself discreetly out of the way of danger.  When the memorable schism took place in the Roman government by the election of an anti-pope, and both popes proclaimed a crusade and issued their indulgences, Wyclif, who heretofore had admitted the primacy of the Roman See, now openly proclaimed the doctrine that the Church would be better off with no pope at all.  He owed his safety to the bitterness of the rival popes, who in their mutual quarrels had no time to think of him.  And his opportunity was improved by writing books and homilies, in which the anti-christian claims of the popes were fearlessly exposed and commented upon.  In fact, he now openly denounces the Pope as Antichrist, from his pulpit at Luttenworth, to his simple-minded parishioners, for whose good he seems to have earnestly labored,—­the model of a parish priest.  It is supposed that Chaucer had him in view when he wrote his celebrated description of a good parson,—­“benign” and diligent, learned and pious, giving a noble example to his flock of disinterestedness and devotion to truth and duty, in contrast with the ordinary lives of the clergy of those times, who had sunk far below the levels of their calling in purer ages and such as neither popular nor churchly standards of intelligent times would tolerate.

Hitherto Wyclif had simply protested against the external evils of the Church without much effect, although protected by powerful laymen and encouraged by popular favor.  The time had not come for a real and permanent reformation; but he prepared the way for it, and in no slight degree, by his translation of the Scriptures into the vernacular tongue,—­the greatest service he rendered to the English people and the cause of civilization.  All the great reformers, successful and unsuccessful, appealed to the Scriptures as the highest authority, even when they did not rebel against the papal power, like Savonarola in Florence.  I do not get the impression that Wyclif was a great popular preacher like the Florentine reformer, or like Luther, Latimer, and Knox.  He was a student, first of the Scholastic theology, and afterwards of the Bible.  He lived in a quiet way, as scholars love to live, in his retired rectory near Oxford, preaching plain and simple sermons to his parishioners, but spending his time chiefly in his library, or study.

Wyclif’s translation of the Bible was a great event, for it was the first which was made in English, although parts of the Bible had been translated into the Saxon tongue between the seventh and eleventh centuries.  He had no predecessor in that vast work, and he labored amid innumerable obstacles.  It was not a translation from the original Greek and Hebrew, for but little was known of either language in the fourteenth century:  not until the fall of Constantinople into the hands of the Turks was