Stoics and Saints - College of Stoic Philosophers

PERMANENCE OF HIS WORK. 291
are wrong, radically wrong, in our attempt at a kingdom of
Heaven, and that the righting them will be solemn and costly
work ;
and so when a great power of God seems to be mani
festing itself, men give pause, not ignobly altogether, but
rather as Moses trembled before his mission, appalled by the
magnitude of the task. These thoughts and feelings, with
other influences that might be adduced, create, so to speak,
the atmosphere
in which the reactionaries work. In this
case, there was a political motif, that was supplied by the
defective title to the throne of the Lancastrian kings. Like
Louis Napoleon and others of our own time, trembling for
their power, they sought
the sinister alliance of the Church.
Frightened people soon get cruel, and the fires were quickly
kindled in which Cobharn and other noble martyrs perished.
They dug up Wyclif s bones _a.nd burned them, ami-scattered
the ashes to the winds and seas. Fools !
_JThe winds and the
seas had already fulfilled ITbenignerjgmistry J:hey had borne
;
his relics, the living germs of his intellect and spirit,
and
scattered them broadcast through Europe,
the vital seeds
of a lasting Eeformation ;
and what cared he for his
bones ?
Through all the dark times, however, which followed on
the age of Wyclif, his work remained as he had left it.
There
was the Book and the Tracts and Treatises of the Eeformer
in vulgar English, the tongue of the great English people,
and these kept still glowing the embers which, when the
days of the reaction were ended, leapt forth into such brilliant
quickening flame. There WAS the Book ! There is the Book !
and while this Book abides the priest cantilever triumph in
Christendom, nor the Gospel perish
out of~4be world.- Of
all that the Reformation, and the Bible which it has put into
the hands of the people, have done for England, we must
hold John Wyclif to be the earthly parent, as fellow-helper
on earth with Christ in heaven. The greatest Englishman