Historic Bubbles

by Frederic Leake

William of Wykeham had been chancellor of England and had resigned. In the next reign, that of Richard II., he was once more raised to that high office. In the meantime he had fallen out with John of Gaunt duke of Lancaster uncle of Richard, and that quarrel brought about an alliance between the duke and Wiclif. John was the fourth son of Edward III. and possessed the qualities of his race. He is supposed to have aimed to succeed his father on the throne, in contempt of the rights of his nephew, son of his illustrious brother the Black prince; but the boy had not yet displayed the unworthy traits which finally cost him his crown; and the memory of his father proved sufficient to guarantee the succession of one of England’s weakest sovereigns.

Finding the English throne impracticable, John attempted that of Castile, but here he met a rival whose claim was but little more valid than his, but who had got the start of him. Later the progeny of John of Gaunt and of Henry of Trastamara intermarried; and the present Houses of Hapsburg and Bourbon are descended from both of these adventurers.

Foiled in Castile duke John returned to England and plunged into politics. What the contention was between him and William of Wykeham, is not clear. It is probable that duke John was out of money, and remembering him of the manner in which his great-grandfather Philip had replenished his coffers, he was trying to defraud the Church, and that the chancellor frustrated those designs. Wiclif who was of the opinion of Agur, with a leaning towards poverty, considered the wealth of the Church as one of its abuses, and he sided with the duke. He did not serve an ingrate, for when at length he was arraigned before the bishop of London to explain his opinions, he walked into court accompanied by John of Gaunt on one side, and John’s friend Percy earl marshal of England on the other. Wiclif was feeble in body, and lord Percy told him to sit down. Not with my permission, said the bishop. Then without it, growled John of Gaunt, and he added that if the bishop put on airs he would drag him from his seat by the hair of his head. The session broke up in disorder; and one of the many inexplicable circumstances connected with Wiclif’s history, is that the populace who took the part of the bishop, vented their discontent not on Wiclif but on his lordly abettors.

Later, duke John abandoned Wiclif but not wantonly or without an effort to fetch him round to what he regarded a common sense view of the case. Politics had shifted, and the duke was on the side of the Church. He suggested to Wiclif that it was time for him to turn his coat also, and finding him obstinate he left him to his own devices for a pragmatical disturber of the public peace. It was inconceivable to John of Gaunt that a man of genius could be in earnest about what he considered as nothing more than the futilities of the schools.

Wiclif’s greatest work was his translation of the scriptures into English; but his version was not one that we would accept to-day for our guidance. It was the translation of the translation of a translation. Let us look a little into its pedigree: Some years before the birth of Christ, the old testament was translated into Greek. This version is called the Septuagint, because, according to the legend, seventy-two learned doctors were shut up in seventy-two separate cells and set to making seventy-two separate translations of the Hebrew scriptures. They accomplished the task in seventy-two days, and when they came to compare notes their seventy-two versions all agreed word for word letter for letter. There could be no doubt of the inspiration of a work so miraculous; and such was the authority of the Septuagint that the citations of the old testament in the new, are taken from it. The Church of Rome at an early day translated the Septuagint and the Apocrypha into its adopted tongue the latin, and this version is known as the old Vulgate. In the course of ages, and they were dark ages, by careless transcription and by the foisting in of strange theological ideas, the Vulgate had become corrupt, and such was its condition when Wiclif translated it. Two hundred years later the Council of Trent revised it and brought it into its present form. It is now the ultimate Bible of the Church Catholic Apostolic and Roman, from which there is no appeal: the original Hebrew and Greek go for nothing when they differ from it. Do you ask why? I answer that the Church is inspired as well as the Bible, and inspiration for inspiration, the later must supercede the earlier. You protestants have merely gone back and picked up the exhausted material of the Church, and made out of it a sort of Bible of your own, instead of accepting the better provision she offers you; and it distresses me to add that the Council of Trent has consigned you all to perdition for rejecting the Apocrypha.

Scripture in Wiclif’s day was a new revelation for the people, and the reading of his Bible was eagerly listened to; but some enthusiastic writers dilate upon its wide spread circulation, forgetting that the art of printing was then unknown, and that every copy was in manuscript, and that too not in the facile running hand of the present era, but in black-letter printed out, so to speak, with the pen. Le Bas estimates that a New Testament alone cost the equivalent of thirty pounds sterling money of his day which was early in this century—say two hundred dollars of our time, at which rate the whole Bible would cost say one thousand dollars. There were but few persons in the fourteenth century who could buy such books and but few who could read them.

The style of Wiclif’s Bible is simpler and clearer than the rest of his English. Green says that Wiclif’s style is a model, and that he was the father of our modern vernacular; but this is disposed of by better authority. Sharon Turner says that Wiclif’s style was inferior to that of some of his cotemporaries. Vaughn[19] whose biography of Wiclif is an almost continuous panegyric, says his style is repulsive and unintelligible. Le Bas says it is barbarous. Knight’s history says it is so obscure as to defy interpretation. The truth is, Wiclif like many another man of genius, had not the minor gift of phrase-making; and the better English of his Bible was owing to his collaborators who possessed that gift. Wiclif with the rest of his knowledge, had self-knowledge: he knew his own defects and how to obviate them.

As for his opinions they were fluctuating; and different writers give different accounts of them. His eulogists say they were progressive; his enemies that he recanted. Hume says he had not the spirit of a martyr, and was ready to explain away his doctrines whenever they put him in danger; but it is probable that such was the unpopularity of the French hierarchy that he ran no risk of martyrdom. He was not only left undisturbed in his cure of Lutterworth, but in spite of his opinions he was made one of the royal chaplains at the accession of Richard II.

We find him at one time appealing to the pope against the archbishop of Canterbury; at another, calling his Holiness a purse-kerver that is a pick pocket. Some of his expressions seem to call in doubt the existence of purgatory; but he upholds masses for the dead. He adheres to the seven sacraments, but he not only condemns the restrictions of the Church on the marriage of relatives, he approves of that connection between those more nearly allied in blood than is now sanctioned by modern legislation. He was no doubt betrayed at times by the sharpness of his own dialectics. His was the logic of the schools, the logic of the nominalists and the realists, of Abelard, Aquinus and Dun Scotus, a logic by which anything might be proved or disproved at choice.

The most important and most difficult question is what were his opinions of the Eucharist. It is commonly said that he denied Transubstantiation. But how far did he deny it?