It was the peculiarity of Wyclif to recognize the real 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 or “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 itself, which made him so wrathful on the “vagrant friars preaching their catchpenny sermons.”  And so of other abuses of the Church:  he did not defy the Pope or deny his authority until it was plain that he sought to usurp the prerogatives of kings and secular rulers, and bring both the clergy and laity under his spiritual yoke.  It was not as the first and chief of bishops—­the head of the visible Church—­that Wyclif attacked the Pope, but as a usurper and a tyrant, grasping powers which were not conferred by the early Church, and which did not culminate until Innocent III. had instituted the Mendicant orders, and enforced persecution for religious opinions by the terrors of the Inquisition.  The wealth of the Church was a sore evil in his eyes, since it diverted the clergy from their spiritual duties, and was the cause of innumerable scandals, and was closely connected with simony and the accumulation of benefices in the hands of a single priest.

So it was indignation in view of the corruptions of the Church and vehement attacks upon them which characterized Wyclif, rather than efforts to remove their causes, as was the case with Luther.  He was not a radical reformer; he only prepared the way for radical reform, by his translation of the Scriptures into a language the people could read, more than by any attacks on the monks or papal usurpations or indulgences for sin.  He was the type of a meditative scholar and theologian, thin and worn, without much charm of conversation except to men of rank, or great animal vivacity such as delights the people.  Nor was he a religious genius, like Thomas a Kempis, Anselm, and Pascal.  He had no remarkable insight into spiritual things; his intellectual and moral nature preponderated over the emotional, so that he was charged with intellectual pride and desire for distinction.  Yet no one disputed the blamelessness of his life and the elevation of his character.