When in 1378 his enemy and persecutor Gregory the Eleventh died, he welcomed the accession of Urban the Sixth, and hoped to see in him a reforming head of Christendom. He was soon disappointed. The anti-pope Clement was set up at Avignon, and gods and men were edified by the spectacle of the two successors of St. Peter issuing excommunications and raising armies against each other. Then, and not till then, Wycliffe denied all papal power over the Church.

The positive basis which Wycliffe set up, in place of absolute church authority, was the Bible. We find exactly the same devotion to the literal text in Wycliffe and his followers as among the later Puritans. He even declared that it was our only ground for belief in Christ. Without this positive basis, the struggle against Romanism could never have met with the partial success that eventually attended it.

As for a new scheme of church government, Wycliffe cannot be said to have put one forward. He pleaded for greater simplicity of organization, greater freedom of the individual, and less crushing authority. As his object was to free those laymen and parsons who were of his way of thinking from the control of the pope and bishops, he proposed to abolish the existing forms of church government. But he never devised any other machinery, such as a presbytery, to take their place. The time had not come for definite schemes, such as were possible and necessary in the days of Luther, Calvin, and Cranmer, for success was not even distantly in sight. The position of the Lollards was anomalous, standing half inside and half outside the Church.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Loserth, The Beginnings of Wyclif's Activity in Ecclesiastical Politics in the English Historical Review, 1896, pp. 319 ff. Lechler, Life of John Wyclif. Capes, History of the English Church in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. Gee and Hardy, Documents Illustrative of English Church History.

THE development of Tudor absolutism after the battle of Bosworth helped to direct into peaceful channels the forces which had been wasted and checked by feudal and dynastic conflicts. The rapid expansion of ocean trade gave the requisite opportunities for the numerical increase of the trading and industrial classes, and the correlated classes such as the lawyers. The introduction of the printing-press stimulated intellectual activity which quickly widened the range of man's interests and speculations. This general European awakening was represented in England by many distinguished men, among whom Colet, More, Grocyn, and Linacre stand out most prominently. With this group is often associated Erasmus who, though born at Rotterdam, was cosmopolitan by nature and spent some time in England. Several of these men of letters while loyal to the authority of the Church Universal were keenly alive to many existing abuses in Church and State, and in two famous works, the Praise of Folly and the Utopia, Erasmus and More gave free swing to the spirit of criticism. Of these two books, Seebohm, in his Oxford Reformers, gives an entertaining account.

§ 1. Erasmus Writes the "Praise of Folly" While Resting at More's House (1510 or 1511) 1

To beguile his time, Erasmus took pen and paper, and began to

1 Seebohm, The Oxford Reformers, 3d edition, pp. 192 ff. and 346 ff. By permission of Frederick Seebohm, Esq., and Messrs. Longmans, Green, & Company, Publishers.

write down at his leisure the satirical reflections on men and things which, as already mentioned, had grown up within him during his recent travels, and served to beguile the tedium of his journey from Italy to England. It was not done with any grave design or any view of publication; but he knew his friend More was fond of a joke, and he wanted something to do to take his attention from the weariness of the pain which he was suffering. So he worked away at his manuscript. One day when More came home from business, bringing a friend or two with him, Erasmus brought it out for their amusement. The fun would be so much the greater, he thought, when shared by several together. He had fancied Folly putting on her cap and bells, mounting her rostrum, and delivering an address to her votaries on the affairs of mankind. These few select friends having heard what he had already written, were so delighted with it that they insisted on its being completed. In about a week the whole was finished. This is the simple history of the Praise of Folly.

2. Grammarians and the Scholastic System

It was a satire upon follies of all kinds. The bookworm was smiled at for his lantern jaws and sickly look; the sportsman for his love of butchery; the superstitious were sneered at for attributing strange virtues to images and shrines, for worshipping another Hercules under the name of St. George, for going on pilgrimage when their proper duty was at home. The wickedness of fictitious pardons and the sale of indulgences, the folly of prayers to the Virgin in shipwreck or distress, received each a passing

censure.

Grammarians were singled out of the regiment of fools as the most servile votaries of folly. They were described as "a race of men the most miserable, who grow old in penury and filth in their schools schools, did I say? prisons! dungeons! I should have said among their boys, deafened with din, poisoned by a fetid atmosphere, but, thanks to their folly, perfectly self-satisfied, so long as they can bawl and shout to their terrified boys, and box and beat and flog them, and so indulge in all kinds of ways their cruel disposition."

After criticising with less severity poets and authors, rhetoricians and lawyers, Folly proceeded to reëcho the censure of Colet upon the dogmatic system of the Schoolmen.

She ridiculed the logical subtlety which spent itself on splitting

hairs and disputing about nothing, and to which the modern followers of the Schoolmen were so painfully addicted. She ridiculed, too, the prevalent dogmatic philosophy and science, which having been embraced by the Schoolmen and sanctioned by ecclesiastical authority, had become a part of the scholastic system. "With what ease do they dream and prate of the creation of innumerable worlds; measuring sun, moon, stars, and earth as though by a thumb and thread; rendering a reason for thunder, wind, eclipse, and other inexplicable things; never hesitating in the least, just as though they had been admitted into the secrets of creation, or as though they had come down to us from the council of the Gods with whom, and whose conjectures, Nature is mightily amused!"

§3. Scholastic Theology and Foolish Questions

From dogmatic science Folly turned at once to dogmatic theology, and proceeded to comment in her severest fashion on a class whom, she observes, it might have been safest to pass over in silence divines. "Their pride and irritability are such (she said) that they will come down upon me with their six hundred conclusions, and compel me to recant; and, if I refuse, declare me a heretic forthwith. . . . They explain to their own satisfaction the most hidden mysteries: how the universe was constructed and arranged through what channels the stain of original sin descends to posterity-how the miraculous birth of Christ was effected how in the Eucharist wafer the accidents can exist without a substance, and so forth. And they think themselves equal to the solution of such questions as these: Whether . . . God could have taken upon himself the nature of a woman, a devil, an ass, a gourd, or a stone? And how in that case a gourd could have preached, worked miracles, and been nailed to the cross? What Peter would have consecrated if he had consecrated the Eucharist at the moment that the body of Christ was hanging upon the Cross? Whether at that moment Christ could have been called a man? Whether we shall eat and drink after the resurrection?" In a later edition, Folly is made to say further: "These Schoolmen possess such learning and subtlety that I fancy even the Apostles themselves would need another Spirit, if they had to engage with this new race of divines about questions of this kind."

After pursuing the subject further, Folly suggests that an army

of them should be sent against the Turks, not in the hope that the Turks might be converted by them so much as that Christendom would be relieved by their absence, and then she is made quietly to say: "You may think all this is said in joke, but seriously, there are some, even amongst divines themselves, versed in better learning, who are disgusted at these (as they think) frivolous subtleties of divines. There are some who execrate, as a kind of sacrilege, and consider as the greatest impiety these attempts to dispute with unhallowed lips and profane arguments about things so holy that they should rather be adored than explained, to define them with so much presumption, and to pollute the majesty of divine theology with cold, yea and sordid, words and thoughts. But, in spite of these, with the greatest self-complacency divines go on spending night and day over their foolish studies, so that they never have any leisure left for the perusal of the gospels, or the epistles of St. Paul."

Finally, Folly exclaims, "Are they not the most happy of men whilst they are treating of these things? whilst describing everything in the infernal regions as exactly as though they had lived there for years? whilst creating new spheres at pleasure, one, the largest and most beautiful, being finally added, that, forsooth, happy spirits might have room enough to take a walk, to spread their feasts, or to play at ball?" . . .

Monks came in for at least as rough a handling. There is perhaps no more severe and powerful passage anywhere in the whole book than that in which Folly is made to draw a picture of their appearance on the Judgment Day, finding themselves with the goats on the left hand of the Judge, pleading hard their rigorous observance of the rules and ceremonies of their respective orders, but interrupted by the solemn question from the Judge: "Whence this race of new Jews? I know only of one law which is really mine; but of that I hear nothing at all. When on earth, without mystery or parable, I openly promised my Father's inheritance, not to cowls, matins, or fastings, but to the practice of faith and charity. I know you not, ye who know nothing but your own works. Let those who wish to be thought more holy than I am inhabit their newly discovered heavens; and let those who prefer their own traditions to my precepts, order new ones to be built for them." When they shall hear this (continues Folly), "and see sailors and wagoners preferred to themselves, how do you think they will look upon each other?"