him from
obeying the summons of the Pope to Rome, where he would doubtless have
suffered as a martyr. In 1384 he was struck with paralysis, and died in
three days after the attack, at the age of sixty,--though some say in
his sixty-fourth year,--probably, in spite of ecclesiastical censure,
the most revered man of his day, as well as one of the ablest and most
learned. Not from the ranks of fanatics or illiterate popular orators
did the Reformation come in any country, but from the greatest scholars
and theologians.

This grand old man, the illustrious pioneer of reform in England, and
indeed on the Continent, did not live to threescore years and ten, but,
being worn out with his exhaustive labors, he died peaceably and
unmolested in his retired parish. Not much is known of the details of
his personal history, any more than of Shakspeare's. We know nothing of
his loves and hatreds, of his habits and tastes, of his temper and
person, of his friends and enemies. He stands out to the eye of
posterity in solitary and mysterious loneliness. Tradition speaks of him
as a successful, benignant, and charitable parish priest, giving
consolation to the afflicted and to the sick. He lived in
honor,--professor of theology at Oxford, holding a prebendal stall and a
parochial rectory, perhaps a seat in Parliament, and was employed by the
Crown as an ambassador to Bruges. He was statesman as well as
theologian, and lived among the great,--more as a learned doctor than as
a saint, which he was not from the Catholic standpoint. "He was the
scourge of imposture, the ponderous hammer which smote the brazen
idolatry of his age." He labored to expose the vices that had taken
shelter in the sanctuary of the Church,--a reformer of ecclesiastical
abuses rather than of the lax morals of the laity, and hence did
different work from that of Savonarola, whose life was spent in a
crusade against sin, wherever it was to be found. His labors were great,
and his attainments remarkable for his age. He is accused of being
coarse in his invectives; but that charge can also be laid to Luther and
other reformers in rough and outspoken times. Considering the power of
the Pope in the fourteenth century, Wyclif was as bold and courageous as
Luther. The weakness of the papacy had not been exposed by the Councils
of Pisa, of Constance, and of Basil; nor was popular indignation in view
of the sale of indulgences as great in England as when the Dominican
Tetzel p