The language in which he denounced transubstantiation antici pated that of the Protestant reformers; it is a "blasphemous folly," philosophically it is nonsense, since it presupposes the possibility of an accident existing without its substance; it over throws the very nature of a sacrament. Yet the consecrated bread and wine are the body and blood of Christ, for Christ himself says so (Fast. Zizan. p. 115) ; we do not, however, corporeally touch and break the Lord's body, which is present only sacramentaliter, spiritualiter et virtualiter—as the soul is present in the body. The real presence is not denied ; what Wycliffe "dares not affirm" is that the bread is after consecration "essentially, substantially, corporeally and identically" the body of Christ. His doctrine approximates to the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation, as distinguished from the Zwinglian teaching accepted in the xxviii. Article of Religion of the Church of England.
The theologians of the university were at once aroused. The chancellor, William Barton, sat with twelve doctors (six of whom were friars), and solemnly condemned the theses. Wycliffe ap pealed, not to the pope, but to the king. But the lay magnates, who were perfectly ready to help the church to attain to the ideal of apostolic poverty, shrank from the responsibility of supporting obscure propositions, which involved undoubted heresy and the pains of hell. John of Gaunt hastily sent a messenger enjoining the reformer to keep silence. The rift thus created between Wycliffe and his patrons in high places was widened by the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, the result of which was to draw the conservative elements in church and state together.
With the Peasants' Revolt it has been supposed that Wycliffe had something to do. One of its leaders, John Ball, when con demned, confessed that he learned his subversive doctrines from Wycliffe. We have, however, not only the repeated testimony of Knyghton that he was a "precursor" of Wycliffe, but also docu mentary evidence that be was excommunicated in 1366, long before Wycliffe exposed himself to ecclesiastical censure. Wy cliffe's communistic views are theoretical and confined to his Latin scholastic writings. They could not reach the people directly. Possibly his followers translated them in their popular discourses, and thus fed the flame that burst forth in the rebellion.
In the spring after the Revolt his old enemy, William Cour tenay, who had succeeded the murdered archbishop Sudbury as archbishop of Canterbury, resolved to stamp out Wycliffe's crown ing heresy. He called a court of bishops, theologians and canon ists at the Blackfriars' convent. This proceeding was met by a manifestation of university feeling on Wycliffe's side. The chan cellor, Robert Rygge, though he had joined in the condemnation of the theses, stood by him, as did also both the proctors. The Council decided that out of 24 articles extracted from Wycliffe's works, ten were heretical and fourteen erroneous. The reply of the chancellor was to deny the archbishop's jurisdiction within the university, and to allow Philip Repington, disciple of Wycliffe, to preach before the university. The chancellor and proctors were now summoned to appear before the Blackfriars' court on the I 2th of June. Though they were, with the majority of regent
masters at Oxford, on the side of Wycliffe, the main question was for them one of philosophy rather than faith, and they made formal submission to the authority of the Church.
Wycliffe himself remained at large and unmolested. That his strength among the laity was undiminished is shown by the fact that an ordinance passed by the House of Lords alone, in May 1382, against the itinerant preachers was annulled on the petition of the Commons in the following autumn. The reformer, however, was growing old and now occupied himself in writing numerous tracts and two of his most important works. The Trialogus is a summing up of his arguments and conclusions on philosophy and doctrine. It was the most influential of all Wycliffe's works, and was the first to be printed (1525). All the only four known com plete mss. of the work, preserved in the Imperial Library at Vienna, are of Hussite origin. The note of both the Trialogus and of the unfinished Opus evangelicum, Wycliffe's last work, is their insistence on the "sufficiency of Holy Scripture." In 1382, or early in 1383, Wycliffe was seized with a paralytic stroke. On the 28th of December 1384, he had a final stroke, from the effects of which he died on the New Year's eve. He was buried at Lutterworth ; but by a decree of the council of Constance, May 4, 1415, his remains were ordered to be dug up and burned, an order which was carried out, at the command of Pope Martin V., by Bishop Fleming in 1428.
A sober study of Wycliffe's life and works justifies a conviction of his complete sincerity and earnest striving after what he be lieved to be right. When he conceives the Church as consisting exclusively of the righteous, he may seem to have gone the whole length of the most radical reformers of the 16th century. And yet, powerful as was his influence in England, his doctrines in his own country were doomed to become for a century and a half the creed only of obscure sectaries. (See LOLLARDS.) It was otherwise in Bohemia, whither his works had been carried by the scholars who came to England in the train of Richard II.'s queen, Anne of Bohemia. Here his writings were eagerly read and multi plied, and here his disciple, John Huss (q.v.) raised Wycliffe's doctrine to the dignity of a national religion. Extracts from the De ecclesia and the De potestate Papae of the English reformer made up the greater part of the De ecclesia of Huss, a work for centuries ascribed solely to the Bohemian divine, and for which he was condemned and burnt. It was Wycliffe's, De sufficientia legis Christi that Huss carried with him to convert the council of Constance ; of the fiery discourses now included in the published edition of Wycliffe's Sermones many were likewise long attributed to Huss. Finally, it was from the De eucharistia that the Taborites derived their doctrine of the Lord's Supper, with the exception of the granting of the chalice to the laity. To Huss, Luther and other continental reformers owed much, and thus the spirit of the English reformer had its influence on the reformed churches of Europe.