And who abstains from meat, that is not gaunt?
A good effigy of this John, in his robes, is on the glass of a window in All-Souls’ College, Oxford.
But such great friends, and Wyclif numbered the widow of the Black Prince among them, could not shield him entirely from Romish wrath, when he began to call the Pope a “cut-purse;” and his arguments were as scathing as his epithets, and had more reason in them. He was compelled to forego his teachings at Oxford, and came to new trials,[38] at which—as traditions run—he wore an air of great dignity; and old portraits show us a thin, tall figure—a little bent with over-study; his features sharp-cut, with lips full of firmness, a flowing white beard and piercing eyes—glowing with the faith that was in him. This was he who blocked out the path along which England stumbled through Lollardry quagmires, and where Huss, the Bohemian, walked in after days with a clumsy, forward tread, and which Luther in his later time put all alight with his torch of flame.
The King—and it was one of the last good deeds of Edward III.—gave to the old man who was railed at by Popes and bishops, a church living at Lutterworth, a pleasant village in Leicestershire, upon a branch of that Avon, which flows by Stratford Church; and here the white-haired old man—some five hundred years ago (1384) finished his life; and here the sexton of the church will show one to-day the gown in which he preached, and the pulpit in which he stood.
Even now I have not spoken of those facts about this early Reformer, which are best kept in memory, and which make his name memorable in connection with the literature of England. In the quiet of Lutterworth he translated the Latin Bible (probably not knowing well either Greek or Hebrew, as very few did in that day); not doing all this work himself, but specially looking after the Gospels, and perhaps all of the New Testament.
The reader will, I think, be interested in a little fragment of this work of his (from Matthew viii.).
“Sothely [verily] Jhesus seeynge many cumpanyes about hym, bad his disciplis go ouer the watir. And oo [one] scribe or a man of lawe, commynge to, saide to hym—Maistre, I shall sue [follow] thee whidir euer thou shalt go. And Jhesus said to hym, Foxis han dichis or borrowis [holes] and briddes of the eir han nestis; but mannes sone hath nat wher he reste his heued. Sotheli an other of his disciplis saide to hym—Lord, suffre me go first and birye my fadir. Forsothe Jhesus saide to hym, Sue thou me, and late dede men birye her dead men.”
It is surely not very hard reading;—still less so in the form as revised by Purvey,[39] an old assistant of his in the Parish of Lutterworth; and it made the groundwork of an English sacred dialect, which with its Thees and Thous and Speaketh and Heareth and Prayeth has given its flavor to all succeeding translations, and to all utterances of praise and thanksgiving in every English pulpit.
Not only this, but Wyclif by his translation opened an easy English pathway into the arcana of sacred mysteries, which in all previous time—save for exceptional parts, such as the paraphrase of Cædmon, or the Ormulum, or the Psalter of Aldhelm and other fragmentary Anglo-Saxon versions of Scripture—had been veiled from the common people in the dimness of an unknown tongue. But from the date of Wyclif’s translation—forward, forever—whatever man, rich or poor, could read an English ordinance of the King, or a bye-law of a British parish, could also—though he might be driven to stealthy reading—spell his way back, through the old aisles of Sacred History, where Moses and the prophets held their place, and into the valleys of Palestine, where Bethlehem lay, and where Christ was hung upon the tree.