severed with less difficulty, or did its severance provoke less resistance. Very few Englishmen at the time wished to maintain the connexion with Rome. Some wished to restore it later on, when they shrank from the social and religious changes which followed on its fall. The preamble of the Statute of Appeals stated the belief of well-nigh every Englishman when it said that England was an empire, and the nation a complete body within itself, having full power to do justice in all cases, spiritual as well as temporal. Englishmen had learnt that the connexion with Rome was only a hindrance in the way of working out a solution of national problems. The Papacy could not or would not work the reforms which men had long desired, and prevented the Church from attempting them for itself. The result was that the reforms were left for the State to work, and were wrought by rude hands and in rough ways; men murmured but on the whole acquiesced. When the relation with Rome was re-established under Mary, it already wore a foreign look, and after that brief experience Englishmen never wished to hear of it again. The Papacy has changed much since then, and Romanism has developed as much as Anglicanism; but Romanism still seems something foreign and exotic on English soil, and is alien from the aims and from the modes of thought of the average Englishman. This sense of strangeness, this resentment of an intrusive authority, was not the result of the sixteenth century. It dated from much earlier times, and then only found its expression.

166

INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION UPON ENGLAND, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE WORK AND WRITINGS OF JOHN WYCLIF1

ALL great movements which affect the organisation of society are of slow growth, and are complex in their nature. It is difficult always to keep this truth in mind. There is a tendency to investigate one cause to the exclusion of others. There is a tendency to regard only the immediate steps which produced a change, or to criticise only the immediate results which that change produced. I propose to regard the Reformation in England under three aspects: political, moral and intellectual; and to consider the larger and more permanent causes and results.

(1) Politically, the Reformation expressed the dissatisfaction of the national spirit with the papal government of the Church. The Middle Ages tell a continuous tale of opposition to papal interference. In England, earlier than in any other country, a national spirit was developed. The end of the thirteenth century saw England united under a truly national system of government. The Pope was not allowed to exercise any influence on English affairs. Clergy and laity alike saw with growing discontent

1 Paper read at the Carlisle Church Congress, 1884.

the drain of English money to the Roman Court. So far as the Reformation declared that the affairs of the English Church could be managed within the realm, it only expressed a long prevailing sentiment of the English people.

(2) Morally, the organisation of the Mediæval Church had become unwieldy. Institutions once useful had survived the period of their usefulness. Monasticism fostered an indolent class. There were too many clergy, and many of them acted unworthily of their calling. Ecclesiastical discipline had become a vexatious means of exacting money. Ecclesiastical disputes were common, and appeals to Rome were encouraged. A process in the papal court was costly and was endless. Diocesan and provincial jurisdictions were almost destroyed by the system of appeals. The encroachments of Rome had thrown into confusion the old machinery of the Church. Thoughtful men had long seen the dangers of this disorganisation, and the need of reform; but national or provincial synods were powerless without the Pope. Even Europe, united in the reforming Councils of the fifteenth century, failed to discover a practicable scheme for reform. Nothing could be done save through the Papacy, and the Papacy became more and more secular in its aims, more and more immersed in Italian politics. Meanwhile the feeling of nationality grew apace. In England the rise of a prosperous middle class created a practical spirit which wished to see the Church made more useful to the people. The associations of the past ceased to outweigh the needs of the present. The clergy

were bidden to feel that they were made for the people, not the people for them. The moral aspect of the Reformation was a desire for a simpler Church system, more intimately connected with the aspirations of national life.

(3) Intellectually, the Reformation movement was helped by an increased knowledge of the world, of literature and of the language of the Scriptures. Men were not satisfied with being told that doctrines or ceremonies were the traditions of the Church; they asked for the grounds of these traditions; they demanded proof of their agreement with the words of the Church's Divine Founder.

These three tendencies were each of them of long growth. No one of them necessarily involved the overthrow of the papal headship, or any breach in the outward unity of the Church; but when they all came together, they created a mass of opposition to the existing system, which ended in a series of revolts.

The importance of Wyclif in religious history lies in the fact that in him these three tendencies first converged, and were embodied in his career. At first he was an ecclesiastical politician, who employed his learning in finding arguments for combating the papal claims to interfere in the affairs of the English Church. Next he laboured at the restoration of preaching and a revival of religious life. The more he increased in spiritual earnestness, the more he felt that the spiritual interests of men were sacrificed to an overgrown ecclesiastical system. He asserted that the Church was the congregation of faithful people, and that the papal primacy ought to be

exercised solely for the purpose of ministering to their needs. His noble translation of the Bible put into the hands of Englishmen the whole Scripture. “Our great charter," he calls it, "written and given to us by God, on which alone we can found our claims to His kingdom." Then, in the interests, as he thought, of theological learning, Wyclif went on to attack the current form in which the doctrine of the Sacrament of the Altar was expressed. He invoked "grammar, logic, natural science and the sense of the Gospel," against a definition which stated that the words of the priest at consecration wrought a change in the actual substance of the bread and wine. He did not deny, nay, he condemned those who denied, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Christ's body, he said, was sacramentally and spiritually, but still actually, present in every part of the Host, as the soul was present in the human body. Wyclif did not seek to overthrow the current belief in the nature of the Sacrament; he only demanded that the philosophical definition of its operation should be less material and more spiritual. He thought that the language in ordinary use was unscientific and led to a low view of the Sacrament itself, and to an undue exaltation of the person of the priest.

Thus, politically, Wyclif asserted the freedom of England from papal interference; morally, he strove to adapt the ecclesiastical system to the needs of the people; intellectually, he demanded that doctrines should be defined in accordance with "logic, natural science and the sense of the Gospel". Wyclif strove