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 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.