BOOKS.
VAUGHAN'S WYCLIFFE.* IN an age like our own, when authorship is one of the acknow- ledged professions and men of letters obtain a livelihood by their writings, a sense of the dignity of their calling is often not strong enough to prevent them from looking primarily to their profits, and subordinating to these the excellence of the work done, the permanent reputation of the writer, and, the instruction and en- joyment of the reader. This evil tendency, manifesting itself in various shapes, has caused among us bookmaking. Its general result is the publication of books in which the matter bears a scanty, proportion to the number of pages, or which are needless repetitions of other books, the matter being good and full but old and of easy access. Dr. Vaughan has exemplified in his John de Wycliffe, D.D., a Monograph, the most pardonable form of the vice. He has dished up again matter of his own, which has already served him twice ; and had his third presentment been really an improvement either by matured skill in the art of lite- rary cookery or by the application of the very valuable process of concentration by boiling down, we certainly should have exempted him from the charge of bookmaking at alL But the reverse ap- pears to be the case. The "Life and Opinions of Wycliffe," pub- lished twenty-five years ago by Dr. Vaughan, contains more mat- ter, and is written in a style less like that of a magazine article, than the volume before us ; while in the volume of Wycliffe's "Tracts and Treatises," edited by Dr. Vaughan in 1845 for the Wycliffe Society, less than a hundred pages serve for a memoir of Wycliffe containing all the detail that is known about him, amply illustrated from his writings ; the remainder of not a very bulky volume being devoted to an incomparably fuller account of his works, printed and manuscript, than the present volume furnishes, and to the reproduction in full of several interesting treatises, in addition to which an account of the famous treatise embodying his Oxford lectures, and known by the title of " Trialogus," occupies a third of the whole volume. Any one who wishes to study Wy- cliffe will find this volume—the first of the series published by the Wycliffe Society—indisputably the most valuable aid contri- buted by Dr. Vaughan to the subject; and though we do not rate other labourers in the same field as beneath notice, Dr. Vaughan has undoubtedly done the work of a diligent inquirer towards making the public acquainted with the Reformer's miscellaneous writings.
We will give an instance of what we mean in saying that the style of this book approaches too near to that of a magazine article. In the volume edited for the Wycliffe Society, Dr. Vaughan says, with perfect truth, "Concerning the early years of Wycliffe we possess not a vestige of information." Yet in the new volume he spins this nothing into a tissue of twenty-five pages, adorned with four trashy engravings. It is needless to inform the reader, that the topography of Wycliffe's native place, the fancied emotions of his boyhood, his possible place and means of education, the pos- sible state of the roads in his journey from Richmondshire to Ox- ford, are the staple of which this airy edifice is composed. So, again, a second chapter is made up of the stock commonplaces, familiar to most readers now-a-days, referring to Oxford in the middle ages. If there were any novelty in the quotations brought to illustrate these matters, or any of Carlyle 's imaginative power in making pictures out of them, the instruction and pleasure im- parted would be justification enough ; though even then, we should insist upon removing the word "monograph" from the titlepage, as that, to our minds, implies a close and scientific treat- ment of a single subject, carefully excluding matter common to a great multitude of subjects. The earliest work aimed at some- thing like the /ife and times of Wycliffe ; the title of the present work guarantees a concentration of positive information about Wycliffe himself, and this title is not borne out.
But, though Dr. Vaughan has in this volume fallen, somewhat too much for his subject and somewhat too much for his own repu- tation as an historian, into the diffuseness and gossipy tone of a popular lecture, this must not be allowed to derogate from the merit of the service he had previously rendered to English eccle- siastical and religious history by his diligent personal examination of so many of Wycliffe's manuscript works. It had been the fash- ion to charge Wycliffe with holding theological doctrines not only opposed to Romanist but also to Protestant orthodoxy. He had moreover been represented as vacillating in his opinions, and as re- canting them when they exposed him to danger. His motives, too, have been impugned, by Protestant as well as Romanist writers. Such plausibility as these charges had (and they are supported, partially or wholly, by, among others, Melancthon, Anthony a Wood, and Fox) was mainly derived from a con- fusion in the dates of his writings, which Dr. Vaughan has labour- ed with success to correct ; and the first great English Protestant stands out in his pages as a man who was from the first consistent with himself, whose views were matured by thought and expe- rience, as his original principles were successively brought to bear upon different dogmas of the church and different abuses of the hieritrehy. The fact is, that Wycliffe preached a reformation in the church far more thoroughgoing than was afterwards effected either in England or in Germany ; and this has brought down upon him the censures of English churchmen who cling to a • Sohn De Wycliffe, D.D. A Monograph. With some Account of the Wycliffe MN. in Oxford, Cambridge, the British Museum, Lambeth Palace, and Trinity Col- lege, Dublin. By Robert Vaughan, D.D. Published by Seeleys.
compromise, and of those who held the mystical sacramentarian theories of the Lutheran Church. He far more resembled in his religious and ecclesiastical opinions the Independents of Cromwell's time than either our High or Low Church Protestants ; and calm judicious writers have seen in this fact one cause of his failure, if failure it can be called, and have not grieved over the delay of a century and a half, which intrusted the destinies of the English Reformation to gentler and more accommodating spirits. He is, as Professor Blunt says, the father of the Puritans rather than of the Church of England ; though Dr. Vaughan claims for lum the common progenitorship of all English Protestants. If the matter of this book were now before the public for the first time, we should be disposed to quote largely from Wycliffe's writings to show seriatim what his opinions really were, and how far his cen- sors, both Protestant and Papist, have been in most points from fairly representing them. But Lewis more than a hundred years ago quoted from them largely enough to have silenced some of the calumnies, though he has not succeeded in so doing ; and Dr. Vaughan has in his Wycliffe-Society volume made it easy for any one to ascertain for himself the truth or falsehood of what has been said about Wycliffe from Melancthon down to Lingard. We see no reason for refusing our assent to Dr. Vaughan's general summary of Wycliffe's opinions and character, as given at the close of this volume.
" According to the doctrine of 'Wycliffe, the Crown was supreme in author- ity, over all persons and possessions, within this realm of England ; the persons of churchmen being amenable to the civil courts in common with the laity ; and the property of churchmen being subject to the will of the King, as expressed through the law of the land, in common with all other property. Nor was it enough that be should thus preclude the Papal Court from all meddling with secular things in this English land. According to his ultimate doctrine, the pretence of the Pontiff to exercise even spiritual jurisdiction over the Church of England, as being himself the head of all churches, should be repudiated as an insolent and mischievous usurpation. The whole framework of the existing hierarchy, he describes as a device of clerical ambition, the first step in its ascending scale ; the distinction between bishop and presbyter being an innovation on the policy of the early church, in which the clergy were all upon an equality.-
"Concerning the sacraments, he retained the ordinance of baptism, but without receiving the doctrine of the church in respect to it, as being neces- sary in all cases to salvation. In like manner, he retained the ordinance of the Lord's supper, but without the doctrine of transubstantiation or of con- substantiation. Confirmation was, in his view, a custom originated by churchmen, to gratify their pride ; and penance was a usage which had come from the same quarter, and which bad been constructed so as to mi- nister to their covetousness. To the same effect does he express himself concerning the pretended sacrament of orders, and of extreme unction. None of these services, he maintains, necessarily convey any beneficial in- fluence, and all are disfigured by superstition and fraught with delusion. On baptism, his expressions are at times obscure; but according to his gene- ral language, the value of a sacrament must depend wholly on the mind of the recipient, not at all on the external act performed by the priest ; and, contrary to the received doctrine, he could not allow that infant salvation was dependent on infant baptism. To the last also he believed in the ex- istence of an intermediate state, and in the efficacy of prayer on the part of the living for souls in that state : but masses for the dead, he describes as a piece of priestly machinery, carefully adjusted with a view to gain ; insist- ing that the prayer of a layman with regard to a departed soul would be quite as efficacious as that of a priest, and that all prayer, whether by priests or laymen, must be valueless, if consisting in a mere repetition of forms, un- accompanied by faith or charity.
"In harmony with these great principles in relation to priestly power, is the earnestness with which the Reformer exposes the utter nullity of church censures. The curse of God, it is affirmed, is never brought upon the inno- cent by such denunciations; nor is the condition of the guilty in the slight- est degree changed by them. The condition of man is not really affected for the better or the worse, in this world or in the next, by anything that the priest may do in relation to him. It is the spiritual condition of the worshiper, as a responsible creature, and that alone, which determines his spiritual destiny. "So, according to the doctrines of Wycliffe, did the priest lose his victim, and man become free. "With these most unacceptable doctrines in relation to the power of the priesthood, Wycliffe associated others, not a whit less obnoxious, concerning its revenues and possessions. The wealth of the clergy, and of the religions orders, he regarded as being, for the most part, ill-gotten, and ill-applied. Hence his solicitude that the civil power should be recognized as having supreme control over it. His interpretation of the sacramental theory, which asserted the spiritual condition of the laity to be independent in all respects of the offices of the clergy, swept away at once all the main sources of priestly revenue. Tithes, indeed, in so far as they might be exacted by law, remained ; but even in relation to them, the teachings of the Reformer were not a little alarming. According to the usage of the early church, pay- ment, said Wycliffe, should be made to pious and useful priests, in sufficient amount to secure them suitable livelihood and clothing.' But only in rela- tion to such priests could obligation, even to that extent, be said to exist. Men withholding reasonable contribution from a pious priest, would be therein blameworthy, but not so blameworthy as the priest who, while filling that office, should fail to preach the gospel to the people. In this manner, according to the theory of Wycliffe, the relation between priest and people, was purely moral, not at all political; but that the civil power might deprive churchmen of their revenues, if proved to be habitually delinquent in the use of them, was a doctrine reiterated by him in every form of language. "Consonant with all this are the doctrines of the Reformer with regard to the sufficiency of Scripture; the right of private judgment ; the duty of
making the Scriptures accessible to the laity in their own tongue ; the effi-
ciency of the atonement made by Christ as the means of removing all sin in the ease of the man trusting to it ; and also of the grace of the Holy Spirit in sanctifying the soul, in the case of the man disposed to avail him- self of that influence. So that while nothing was to be expected from the services of the priest, taken alone, everything might be expected on the part of the worshiper, from his own faith, his own prayer, and his own well-directed effort.
"It requires an intimate knowledge of the modes of thought prevalent in the age of Wycliffe, and a considerable effort of imagination in relation to those times, to enable a man to discern thoroughly the intelligence needed to separate thus between what was then established and what ought to have come in its stead ; and to estimate fully the courage which the man needed to bring to his enterprise who resolved to avow the doctrines now stated sad to meet the consequences of so doing. Thoughts of this high and bold complexion had little or no place in the majority of minds in that age ; and to no mind did they present themselves with the distinctness, fulness, and reality, which characterizes them as given forth by Wycliffe. To him it per- tained that he should thus become the prophecy of a distant future, and that he should be so convinced of the truthfulness of the opinions which gave him this position, as to be prepared to proclaim them aloud, unawed by any measure of probable or possible antagonism to be called forth by them. With the life of Wycliffe really before him, every man of sense must feel that the charge of a deficiency in courage, as brought against the great English Reformer, is simply ridiculous. Profound sincerity only could have given him such convictions and courage of the highest order could alone have sustained him in making such open and continuous proclamation of them.
"We should not omit to observe, that the patriotism and the piety of Wycliffe evidently contributed, along with his intelligence and sincerity, to give this strength to his convictions, and this firmness to the course of action which resulted from them. In his case, the man did not disappear in the ecclesiastic—the patriot was not lost in the priest. In defending the English crown against the Papal crown, and in upholding the just authority of the magistrate in every relation, the words of the Reformer are ever those of the true Englishman, jealous as to the independence, ecclesiastical and civil, of his 'puissant nation.' That the King of England should acknowledge a superior in the man wearing the triple crown; that the clergy of England should refuse, on the ground of their relation to a foreign potentate, to render more than a partial obedience to their own ; and that, on pleas of this nature, French Popes and French Cardinals should be allowed to appropriate to themselves English benefices and to enrich themselves with English treasure,—these were all matters which never seemed to cross the mind of Wycliffe without provoking his patriotism into an impassioned denuncia- tion of them.
" In judging concerning the piety of Wycliffe, it behoves us to view it not so much in its relation to the nineteenth century as in its relation to the fourteenth. That he should have given us not merely the substance of evangelical truth, but that substance in the exact form and phrase in which it has been made familiar to ourselves, no man of liberal thinking would for a moment expect. The Trinity, the Incarnation, the Atonement, the Re- generating influence of the Holy Spirit—all the truths intended by these terms, were taught him in such a manner as to imply his thorough faith in the doctrine of Scripture as to the evil of sin, as to salvation being of grace, and as to the necessity of a renovated and holy life, in the case of all men who would be found at last to be Christians in reality, and not such merely in name. In his whole history, the Reformer is before us as a man con- vinced that the will of God, revealed to us through Christ, is the great rule— the rule at once of rectitude and goodness—to which the life of the good man should in all things be conformed. It is the strength of this conviction that gives so much earnestness to his censures in regard to the conduct of men who make light of the Divine precepts. Man should obey God—be is in the world for that end, and what may follow in this world from his so doing is not to be with him any matter of calculation. So the Reformer taught, and so he acquitted himself. Hence that life of storm and suffering through which he lived ; in place of that life of quiet ease or selfish pleasure through which he might have lived. Wycliffe was truly a believing man— a man with whom the doctrines of the Bible were realities and not fictions. He was, in consequence, a man of much prayer, of much converse with his Maker, gravely conscientious in his views of duty, and concerned above everything to be found doing the will of God in his generation, at whatever hazard by reason of the ungodliness so widely dominant among the men about him."
In the chapter of this work entitled "Wycliffe and the English Bible," Dr. Vaughan has incorporated the leading results of the Prolegomena to that magnificent edition of Wycliffe's Bible pub- lished by the Clarendon Press in 1850, under the editorship of the Reverend Josiah Forshall and Sir Frederic Madden. These gentle- men satisfactorily dispose of Sir Thomas More's assertion, quoted with confident assent by Lingard, that Wycliffe was not the first person to translate the whole Bible into English. They also pro- duce a passage from Wydforde which conclusively proves the identity of the Reformer Wycliffe with the Warden of Canterbury Hall, and so overthrows a plausible hypothesis which has been started _within the last few years, that the Warden was another John Wycliffe, Rector of Mayfield. But the most curious dis- covery made by the editors is, that the New Testament printed by Mr. Lewis more than a century ago, and reprinted by Mr. Bober in 1810, is not the earliest translation, but a revision of this issued by one of 'Wycliffe's followers. The mistake is the more curious, and it illustrates the chances of literary history strikingly, because Henry Wharton had pointed out the character and dates of the two versions.
The volume before us adds nothing to Dr. Vaughan's reputa- tion, though from its very faults it may gain readers who would not choose to master the higher work edited for the Wycliffe Society. That still remains our best exposition of Wycliffe's life and opin- ions. To the life, little, we fear, can ever be added. Indeed, a chronological epitome is the more proper form for a record of a man of whose personal history so few incidents are known. But had Dr. Vaughan wished to treat his subject more exhaustively than he has done in that volume, he might have found two rich fields of inquiry and criticism in the scholasticism of Wycliffe's writings, and in the share those writings, and especially the trans- lation of the Bible, had in the development of the English lan- guage. These two points he leaves almost untouched. Yet the theological writings of the fourteenth century are very hard to ap- prehend except under the guidance of one familiar with the scope and terms of the scholastic philosophy ; and Wycliffe's translation of the Bible shares with Chaucer's poems the honour of being one of the principal expressions and causes of that marvellous genius for language which two centuries later culminated in Shakspere, Spenser, and Bacon, and at once raised English literature to a height it has never since surpassed. Dr. Vaughan has missed the two aspects of his subject which would have most deeply interested the scholar and the thinker; though he has accumulated materials upon which both may profitably exercise themselves, and has pre- sented the religious and political aspects of Wycliffe's life with in- dustry, fairness,
and effect.
Previous page
