I. Wycliffe’s Times
I. Wycliffe’s Times
First and foremost, I shall ask you to remember the religious condition of England in the age when Wycliffe lived.
I shall make no apology for dwelling briefly on this point. A right understanding of it lies at the very root of my whole subject. Without this it is impossible to form a correct estimate of the man about whom I am writing; of the enormous difficulties he had to contend with; and of the greatness of the work which he did.
John Wycliffe was born in the north of Yorkshire, on the banks of the Tees, about the year 1324, in the reign of Edward II., and died in 1384, in the reign of Richard II., more than five hundred years ago. So you will remember that he was born at least a hundred years before the invention of printing, and died about a hundred years before the great German Reformer, Martin Luther, was born. These two facts alone should never be forgotten.
The three centuries immediately preceding our English Reformation, in the middle of which Wycliffe lived, were probably the darkest period in the history of English Christianity. It was a period when the Church of this land was thoroughly, entirely, and completely Roman Catholic—when the Bishop of Rome was the spiritual head of the Church—when Romanism reigned supreme from the Isle of Wight to Berwick-on-Tweed, and from the Land’s End to the North Foreland, and ministers and people were all alike Papists. It is no exaggeration to say that for these three centuries before the Reformation, Christianity in England seems to have been buried under a mass of ignorance, superstition, priestcraft, and immorality. The likeness between the religion of this period and that of the apostolic age was so small, that if St. Paul had risen from the dead he would hardly have called it Christianity at all!
Such were the days when Wycliffe lived. Such were the difficulties which he had to encounter. I charge my readers not to forget them. The man who could do the work he did, and leave the mark that he left on his generation, must have been no common man. I go further: he must have been a servant of Christ, of rare grace and gifts, and singularly filled with the Holy Ghost. I say he is a man worthy of all honour, and we do well to keep him in remembrance.