Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

WYCLIFFE.
283
into the weak hands of Kichard of Bordeaux, a boy
eleven, at his grandfather's death (1377). H
reaped what Edward III. had sown, years of mora
famine after the superficial brilliancy of the Frenc
wars, which emptied the treasury to no solidly good
purpose. Wycliffe sowed even more destructive
seed. The stone, which he cast at authority, fell
back upon the State, unsettled the succession, and
ultimately caused the Wars of the Roses. These, in
their turn, shook the power of the nobility, and
prepared the Tudor tyranny, or rather made it possible.
Wycliffe was born about 1324, at Wycliffe, in
Yorkshire, from which place he took his name. His
career of invective opened as early as 1360 with
violent abuse of the Mendicant Orders, whom he
accused of setting up their rule against the Gospel,
of accumulating money, and of interfering with the
parish priest. A fewr years later his reproaches were
directed against the Pope.1 Already his chief weapon
of destruction was forged : sin disqualifies for power.
He held that, if the Pope was a sinner, he could lay
no claim to authority over other men. But such a
theory wTas destructive of all government on earth.
It is almost a commonplace to say that no man
loves power so much as the patriot and the disinterested
radical. The Archbishop of Canterbury,
Simon Islep, founded Canterbury Hall at Oxford in
1361 in order to promote education and to make up
1 Vaughan, Life of Wycliffe, p. 33.