DR. HANNA'S WYCLEFFE AND THE HUGUENOTS. * WE venture to predict

the entire success of Dr. Hanna's "at- tempt to popularize a portion of ecclesiastical history," that being, as he says, the purpose of the volume now before us. He has been particularly happy in his choice of subjects ; and his mode of treating them will win the approval of the most critical readers, and delight the least learned. The work consists of two courses of lectures, constructed upon different principles, for reasons

which the author thus explains, "As Wycliffe's Life has already been so admirably presented by Dr. Vaughan, to diversify the interest I threw in as much collateral and illustrative informa- tion as I could collect, and indulged freely in episode, and in passing remarks and reflections ; " and this, be it added, he has done with singular skill and discretion. His illustrations are al- ways pertinent, his episodes congruous with the main theme his remarks and reflections characterized by good sense and good ;este. The second part of the work deals with a portion of history less accessible to English readers than the life of their greatest Reformer, for it opens a few years after the date at which Merle d'Aubigne closes his narrative of the rise of the Reformation in France. Here, therefore, the author has "carefully avoided" the latitude he had before allowed himself, and adhered "to the pure and exclusive task of the narrator ; the one object in view being to keep before the eye the incidents described." Merle d'Aubigne's work has been immensely popular in this country ; nevertheless, we are thankful that its author did not continue it, but left the history of Protestantism in France during the thir- teen eventful years which closed with the massacre of St. Bar- tholomew to be told by a writer fully equal to him in graphic power, and immeasurably his superior in most other qualities which an historian should possess. Wycliffe and Luther advanced in their career as Reformers by analogous steps. The first impulse was given to both by the ne- farious practices of the mendicant friars, and neither was in haste to revolt against Rome. In the case of the English Re- former, the process was a slow one by which he was led on from resistance to Papal and ecclesiastical encroachments in temporal things, to an utter repudiation of the Pope's spiritual pretensions. The first occasion on which Wycliffe took a conspicuous and in- fluential part in the public affairs of the nation was when he came up from Oxford to be present at the meeting of Parliament at Westminster, in 1366. Edward III, had, in the preceding year, received from Pope Urban a peremptory demand for pay- ment of the annual tribute of a thousand marks, to which John had submitted as the acknowledged vassal of Rome, together with thirty years' arrears, accumulated since the close of Edward the

• Wycliffe and the Huguenots; or Sketches of the Rise of the Reformation in England and of the Early History of Protestantism in France. By the Rev. William Hanna, LL.D. Published by Constable and Co.

Second's reign. Excommunication was to be the penalty of dis- obedience, and it is now more than ever interesting to see how the bold barons of England and their warlike King encountered a threat which in those days had lost nothing of its tremendous import. Wycliffe's report of the Parliamentary debate on that occasion is /perhaps the earliest specimen of its kind on record. It was embodied by him in a pamphlet which he wrote in defence of the national cause, and from it Dr. Hanna has abstracted the following outlines of the speeches delivered by some of the great barons :—

"The first speaker in the debate is a plain, blunt soldier :—'This king- dom of England,' said he, 'was won by the sword, and by that sword has been defended. Julius Caesar exacted a tribute by force, but force could give him no perpetual right to it. Let the Pope, then' i gird on h sword, and come and try to exact this tribute by force, and I for one am ready to resist him.'

"The second Lord (somewhat more rational), begins his speech by laying it down as a first principle that tribute such as that now claimed could be paid only to those capable of civil or secular rule. The Pope had no such qualification ; his duty was to follow Christ, who refused all secular do- minion. Let us hold him then firmly,' said the speaker, to his own proper spiritual duties, and oppose him when he claims civil power.' " It seems to me,' said the third speaker, 'that we can retort the Pope's own reasoning upon himself. He calls himself the servant of the servants of God. He can claim then suoh a tribute as this, only upon the ground of some good service rendered to this land ; but as, in my Judgment, he renders no such service either spiritually or temporally, but only drains our trea- sure to help our enemies, the tribute, I say, should be denied.' "'The Pope,' argued the fourth speaker, claims lordship over all the ecclesiastical property in England ; but as there cannot be two lords para- mount over the same property, and as we cannot yield the suzerainty of our King over all the property of the kingdom, the Pope must be a vassal to our King, and ought to render a vassal's homage. This he has never done, and we should take care lest, by admitting his present claim, we open his way to some still more flagrant violation of our laws.'

"A fifth Lord wondered whether this payment was originally demanded on the condition of absolving King John, and relieving the land from the Interdict. If so, he denounced it as out and out a simoniacal transaction ; the rendering of priestly service for money payment, which they were bound at all hazard to repudiate. But if the tribute were demanded as the ordinary homage of a vassal to his lord, on the same principle the Pope might declare the throne of England vacant when he liked, and fill it as he pleased.'

"'If our country be the Pope's,' said the sixth speaker, why did he alienate it from Christ, for whom he claims to hold it, for so trifling an equivalent ? It looks to me nothing short of a fraudulent transaction. But since Christ is head over all, and the Pope is peecable, and may, as theologians tell us, forfeit his rights if he fall into mortal sin, it seems to me better to hold our land directly and alone of Christ.' A shade of irony here ; but there was nothing but sober earnestness in the last speaker's words, "I wonder,' he said, ' thatyou do not at once lay your hand upon the entire illegality of the original transaction here. King John bound himself without legal consent of the kingdom. No golden seal of royalty, nor the seals Olf a few lords whom the King coerced to Join him, could sup- ply the place of the national consent, or give validity to the deed. That deed, therefore, sliduld be treated as a nullity.' " The result of the debate was the following decision, in which the three estates of the realm promptly and unanimously emi:- curred :—" Inasmuch as neither King John, nor any other king, could bring his realm and kingdom into such thraldom and sub- jection, but by common assent of Parliament, the which was not given - therefore, that which he did was against his oath at his coronation. If, therefore, the Pope should attempt anything

against the King, by process or other matters in deed, the King with all his subjects should with all their force and power re- sist the same." Such words, uttered by men who were sure to back them by deeds, had power even in the fourteenth century- to daunt the spirit of the Papacy. Urban quietly withdrew his de-

mand for the 1000 marks, and it was never renewed ; though it was not until 1570 that the last futile attempt was made by Pius* V., in his bull directed against Queen Elizabeth, to assert the civil supremacy of the Roman see over the crown and realm of England.

Wycliffe was for a long time protected from the rancour of his enemies by the University, of which he was the most effective champion in its contests with the encroaching monastic orders, and by the powerful influence of John of Gaunt. The monks at last got a majority in the council of the University, and expelled Wycliffe, and John of Gaunt withdrew his protection from him,

alarmed probably by the extreme boldness of the reformer's theory on the subject of church property: Still Wycliffe pursued his

course without faltering, and his principles struck such deep root among his countrymen, that the English Reformation would have been consummated two centuries earlier than its actual date but for two impediments. One was the usurpation of Henry IV., who, to a large extent, owed his throne to Arundel, the Arch- bishop, and repaid the obligation by throwing the whole weight

of his influence into the settle of the church ; the other was the Wars of the Roses, which precluded all opportunity for a revival of the Lollard cause after the persecution that had crushed it. But no seed of freedom was ever sown in vain in England, nor were Wycliffe's labours lost even for his own country, though it was long before their full fruitage was gathered there. For the continent, Wycliffe was truly the day-star of the Reformation; from his writings, John Huss and Jerome of Prague drew those principles which survived the flames kindled by. the Council of

Constance. Forty-two years after Wycliffe's bones had been laid in the grave, they were dug up and burned, and their ashes cast into the little stream that runs by Lutterworth, the parish of which he had been rector. "This brook," says Fuller, "did con- vey his ashes to the Avon, Avon into Severn, Severn fete the narrow seas, then into the main ocean, and thus the ashes of Wy- cliffe were the emblems of his doctrine, which is now dispersed all the world over." Not only was Wycliffe the earliest of the Reformers, and in all respects worthy to rank with the best of that illustrious brother- hood, but in one grand excellence he stood alone, the best and wisest of them all. His mind was the first to conceive, his tongue and his pen were the first to maintain unceasingly the pzinciple

of universal freedom for religious belief. Through five centuries of hideous blundering, the world has been slowly learning the holy truth which his genius discerned and his charity embraced in an age of universal intolerance, and scarcely yet has the prac- tice of it been completely and unassailably established even among the most enlightened communities. England should be as proud of the author of this great discovery in morals, as she is of Bruton and Newton. Wycliffe is known to us only by his deeds and by his writings, and they contain not a single allusion which could help to render less abstract and more concrete the mental image which we try to associate with his name. Personally, he is as little known to us as Shakspeare :— "Bit can we not gather some knowledge of this man from the very ab- sence of all ordinary.information ? Must he not have been a singularly self-oblivious man, singularly absorbed by and intent upon his work, sin-

gularly thoughtless about who was doing it,—who has not left the slightest image or impress of himself on anything he wrote and did ? He appears before us the least egotistical and the most faultless of all our Reformers.

Fos a quarter of a century, he lived in the stormy atmosphere of controversy. In his invectives, he was violent and unrestrained ; he lashed, with unre-

lenting severity, the ambition, the luxury, the worldliness, the selfishness

of friars, prelates, priests. But he never, so far as I am aware, was involved in a personal quarrel; he never stooped to personal abuse. No individual friar, priest, or prelate, is ever selected to suffer beneath his lash. And

though all the vocabulary of abuse was exhausted upon him in return by his irritated adversaries, they have not named a single instance in which he spoke a word that he had to retract, or did a deed for which he had to apo-

logize. The truth is, Wyeliffe's vehemence is altogether different from that of Luther or of Knox. It had not a touch or tinge in it of arrogance or re- sentment; it was the vehemence, not of passion, but of the moral sense. It was the moral nature that, set on fire, glowed with all the heat but with none of the virulence of passion. There is not a trace of the proudful, the vindictive, or of the malign emotions in his rudest assault. "It would have been a pleasing task to have spoken of the deep personal piety of this great and good man, but the occasion 18 not suitable for such a

theme. I have but to say a word in conclusion as to the unique position which, as a public man, he occupies in the history of the Reformation. Princes and States whose wealth had been wasted, whose liberties had been

imperilled, had stood up before his time, to resist the ambitious encroach-

ments of the Papacy. Good and holy men within the bosom of the Church had mourned over the corruptions and abuses that prevailed, and single doc- trines, touching even vital matters of the faith, had been questioned or de- nied, and whole communities in the valleys of the Alps and in the plains of Languedoc stood aloof from her communion altogether, professed a purer faith, and practised a simpler worship. But Wycliffe was the first, after that great sacerdotal system of Rome had attained its maturity and strength, who stood up in the high places of the field, and, as the friend at once of

reason and of Scripture, addressing himself to the scholar and the divine as well as to the peasant, denounced that system out and out as unseriptnral, unreasonable, deceiving, enslaving, degrading the human spirit, and who held up in its stead the simple doctrine of the Redeemer, and the simple in- stitute of the Church as set forth in Holy Writ. "Had he at that early age in which he lived seen but half the length he eavr,—had he done but half of what he did,—bad he attacked but one or two of die chief strengths of the enemy, and brought into action but one or two

of the great engines of war,—our eye had fixed on him as the foremost pioneer of that great host led on by Luther, who, far in advance of all the rest, alone in the thickest of the enemy, had first lifted the war-cry of the

Reformation and commenced the battle. But, a century and a half before the ranks mustered under their great German leader, to see this solitary

English soldier fighting that battle as he did, taking up every position that was afterwards taken up, using every instrument of war that afterwards was used, assaulting every stronghold that was afterwards assaulted—nay,

more, advancing in more than one direction farther than ever Luther led—

alone, deserted, pressing on to the last, not a jot of heart or hope abated, his last strokes his strongest, till he fell, but fell all confident that he left

-victory in store for those who followed ; what annalist of the great cam- paign shall describe to us the place and part in it that such a warrior filled, or who shall weave for us the crown that we would like to plant upon his pale and palsied brow ?"