te. By the
contagion of example he gathered about him other men who thought as he did;
and gradually, under his captaincy, these "poor priests," as they were
called--vowed to poverty because Christ was poor--vowed to accept no
benefice, lest they should misspend the property of the poor, and because,
as apostles, they were bound to go where their Master called them,[466]
spread out over the country as an army of missionaries, to preach the faith
which they found in the Bible--to preach, not of relics and of indulgences,
but of repentance and of the grace of God. They carried with them copies of
the Bible which Wycliffe had translated, leaving here and there, as they
travelled, their costly treasures, as shining seed points of light; and
they refused to recognise the authority of the bishops, or their right to
silence them.

If this had been all, and perhaps if Edward III. had been succeeded by a
prince less miserably incapable than his grandson Richard, Wycliffe might
have made good his ground; the movement of the parliament against the pope
might have united in a common stream with the spiritual move against the
church at home, and the Reformation have been antedated by a century. He
was summoned to answer for himself before the Archbishop of Canterbury in
1377. He appeared in court supported by the presence of John of Gaunt, Duke
of Lancaster, the eldest of Edward's surviving sons, and the authorities
were unable to strike him behind so powerful a shield.

But the "poor priests" had other doctrines besides those which they
discovered in the Bible, relating to subjects with which, as apostles, they
would have done better if they had shrunk from meddling. The inefficiency
of the clergy was occasioned, as Wycliffe thought, by their wealth and by
their luxury. He desired to save them from a temptation too heavy for them
to bear, and he insisted that by neglect of duty their wealth had been
forfeited, and that it was the business of the laity to take it from its
unworthy possessors. The invectives with which the argument was accompanied
produced a widely-spread irritation. The reins of the country fell
simultaneously into the weak hands of Richard II., and the consequence was
a rapid spread of disorder. In the year which followed Richard's accession,
consistory judges were assaulted in their courts, sanctuaries were
violated, priests were attacked and ill-treated in church, church-yard, and
cathedral, and even while engage