but it was, as his disciples said, that the World might be his sepulchre, and Christendom his convert. There came a time, even in England, when the fatal laws against his adherents fell dead in their places, and when the almost anarchic frenzy which attended the long wars of the Roses gave way to a peace in which liberty thrived. That was the time for which his quickening thought had waited; and having brooded silent in the air it then burst into voice, as if touching a thousand souls at once. Still earlier on the Continent, in Bohemia, and in Italy, had been felt his vast impulse. John Huss, Jerome of Prague, Savonarola, repeated the onset of his fearless spirit on the system which, like him, they fought to the death, with their differing powers, with their equal consecration; and no one of all died in vain.1 In a copy of the Missal containing the ancient Hussite Liturgy, in the library of the "Clementinum" at Prague, richly. illuminated by loving hands, Wycliffe is pictured at the top, kindling a spark; Huss, below 1 "Huss himself declares, in a paper composed about the year 1411, that, for thirty years, writings of Wicklif were read at Prague University, and that he himself had been in the habit of reading them for more than twenty years."-Neander, "Hist. of Church," Vol. V, page 242. The Roman Catholic Lingard says of him: "Wycliffe made a new translation, multiplied the copies with the aid of transcribers, and by his poor priests recommended it to the perusal of their hearers. In their hands it became an engine of wonderful power. Men were flattered by the appeal to their private judgment; its new doctrines insensibly gained partisans and protectors in the higher classes, who alone were acquainted with the use of letters; a spirit of inquiry was generated; and the seeds were sown of that religious revolution which in little more than a century astonished and convulsed the nations of Europe."-Hist. of Eng., Vol. III, page 311. him, blowing it to a flame; Luther, still lower, waving on high the lighted torch. It is a true picture of that succession in which others followed, with brightening luster, this "Morning Star of the Reformation," till the sky was glowing, through all its arch, with the radiance of the upspringing light! Out of that Reformation issued the new prophetic age whose ample brightness is around us. It lifted England to its great place in Europe. It wrenched powerful states from the Papal control. It gave a wholly new freedom to spirit and thought. It filled this land with its Protestant colonies. It opens to us opportunity and hope. It is on the work accomplished by Wycliffe, and by those who followed, that our liberties have been builded. They are not accidental. They have not been based on diplomacies, or on battles, however these may have sometimes confirmed them. They have not been framed, in their solid strength, by the theories of philosophers, or the inventive devices of statesmen. They are founded on the Bible, made common to all. They have been wrought to their vast, enduring, symmetrical proportions-more lovely than of palaces, statelier than cathedrals-by their wisdom and patience who had learned from the Bible that human power has no authority over the conscience; that man, through Christ, has inheritance in God; and that, by reason of his immortality, he has a right to be helped, and not hindered, by the government which is the organ of society. If the England of Victoria is different from that of Richard Second, if the present Archbishop of Canterbury is a holy apostle by the side of Courtenay or Arundel, if the story of what the kingdom then was appears to men now a ghastly dream-it is because the Bible was made, through toil and strife and agony of blood, the common possession of the people who dwelt "on the sides of the North."1 Thank God that the Book, which at Oxford and Lutterworth was first transferred, in its whole extent, to the English tongue, which this Society has so widely distributed, and for whose final revised translation we now are looking, has been, is now, and shall be henceforth, the American Inheritance: expounded from the pulpit, taught in the household, at home in the school. It is not ours by our own effort, but by this struggle of many generations. It is not ours for our own time alone, but for the centuries which shall follow. The half-millennium which has passed since Wycliffe, the millennium, since Alfred founded his "Dooms" on its Commandments, have not wasted its force. With a divine energy it works to-day, on every hand, for grace and greatness. No future age will cease to need its law, and truth, and inspiration. To us is given the humbler work of making it general and permanent in the land, as others for us have made it free. In the measure of our indebtedness to them, are we responsible for this future. Let us not be unmindful of the great obligation! Let us rival, at least, their zeal for freedom, their devotion to truth, if we may not rival that invincible courage which 1 "Almost a hundred and fifty years before Luther, nearly the same doctrines as he taught had been maintained by Wyckliffe, whose disciples, usually called Lollards, lasted as a numerous, though obscure and proscribed sect, till, aided by the confluence of foreign streams, they swelled into the Protestant Church of England."-Hallam, "Const. Hist. of Eng.," Vol. I, page 57. |