apel was built, an age when
the interests of popular liberty and of intellectual freedom had sheered
off from the church which had so long been their protector. With them
the moral and spiritual life of the people sheered off too. The vast
ecclesiastical fabric rested in the days of Archbishop Sudbury solely on
its wealth and its tradition. Suddenly a single man summed up in himself
the national, the mental, the moral power it had lost, and struck at the
double base on which it rested. Wyclif, the keenest intellect of his
day, national and English to the very core, declared its tradition
corrupt and its wealth antichrist. The two forces that above all had
built up the system of mediaeval Christianity, the subtlety of the
schoolman, the enthusiasm of the penniless preacher, united to strike it
down.

It is curious to mark how timidly the Primate of the day dealt with such
a danger as this. Sudbury was acting in virtue of a Papal injunction,
but he acted as though the shadow of the terrible doom that was awaiting
him had already fallen over him. He summoned the popular Bishop of
London to his aid ere he cited the Reformer to his judgment-seat. It was
not as a prisoner that Wyclif appeared in the chapel: from the first his
tone was that of a man who knew that he was secure. He claimed to have
the most favourable construction put upon his words; then, availing
himself of his peculiar subtlety of interpretation, he demanded that
where they might bear two meanings his judges should take them in an
orthodox sense. It was not a noble scene--there was little in it of
Luther's "Here stand I--I can none other;" but both sides were in fact
acting a part. On the one hand the dead pressure of ecclesiastical
fanaticism was driving the Primate into a position from which he sought
only to escape; on the other Wyclif was merely gaining time--"beating
step," as men say--with his scholastic formulae. What he looked for soon
came. There was a rumour in the City that Papal delegates were sitting
in judgment on the Reformer, and London was at once astir. Crowds of
angry citizens flocked round the archiepiscopal house, and already there
was talk of attacking it when a message from the Council of Regency
commanded a suspension of all proceedings in the case. Sudbury dismissed
his prisoner with a formal injunction, and the day was for ever lost to
the Church.

But if in Sudbury the Church had retreated peaceably before Wyclif, it
was not from