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.

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