tone of
genuine attachment to the "vested interest" principle, and of aversion
from all such interlopers as lay preachers and the like, in the
"Host's" exclamation, uttered after the "Reeve," has been (in his own
style) "sermoning" on the topic of old age:--

What availeth all this wit?
What? should we speak all day of Holy Writ?
The devil surely made a reeve to preach;

for which he is as well suited as a cobbler would be for turning
mariner or physician!

Thus, then, in the England of Chaucer's days we find the Church still
in possession of vast temporal wealth and of great power and
privileges,--as well as of means for enforcing unity of profession
which the legislation of the Lancastrian dynasty, stimulated by the
prevailing fears of heresy, was still further to increase. On the
other hand, we find the influence of the clergy over the minds of the
people diminished though not extinguished. This was, in the case of
the higher secular clergy, partly attributable to their self-indulgence
or neglect of their functions, partly to their having been largely
superseded by the Regulars in the control of the religious life of the
people. The Orders we find no longer at the height of their influence,
but still powerful by their wealth, their numbers, their traditional
hold upon the lower classes, and their determination to retain this
hold even by habitually resorting to the most dubious of methods.
Lastly, we find in the lower secular clergy, and doubtless may also
assume it to have lingered among some of the regular, some of the salt
left whose savour consists in a single-minded and humble resolution to
maintain the highest standard of a religious life. But such "clerks"
as these are at no times the most easily found, because it is not they
who are always running it "unto London, unto St. Paul's" on urgent
private affairs. What wonder, that the real teaching of Wyclif, of
which the full significance could hardly be understood, but by a select
few, should have virtually fallen dead upon his generation, to which
the various agitations and agitators, often mingling ideas of religious
reform with social and political grievances, seemed to be identical in
character and alike to require suppression! In truth, of course, these
movements and their agents were often very different from one another
in their ends, and were not to be suppressed by the same processes.

It should not be forgotten that in this century le