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Updated: June 25, 2025
It did not appear, then, that the revolt of Wiclif in England and of Huss in Europe was about to be renewed: though they had in fact prepared the soil to receive the new seed. Lollardry had been driven beneath the surface.
Remember that Wiclif did not know Greek nor Hebrew, did not need to know them to be the foremost scholar of Oxford in the fourteenth century. Even as late as 1502 there was no professor of Greek at the proud University of Erfurt when Luther was a student there.
King Sigismund and Pope John XXIII, the two vilest men then living on the face of the earth, were the rulers of the Christian world, and they agreed to call a General Council at Constance, in Baden, near Switzerland, for Nov. 1, 1414, in order to end the Schism, to begin the sorely needed reform of the Church, and to settle the heresies of Wiclif and Hus.
The attack upon the growing corruptions of the Church was made more systematically, and from the stand-point of a theologian rather than of a popular moralist and satirist, by John Wiclif, the rector of Lutterworth and professor of divinity in Baliol College, Oxford.
Or ask Erasmus, who never broke with the Church: "What man of real piety does not perceive with sighs that this is far the most corrupt of all ages? When did iniquity abound with more licentiousness? When was charity so cold?" And, as a century before, Wiclif had felt the social need for a popular version of the Bible, so William Tindale felt it now.
Mahomet appears as 'Bafomet, influenced perhaps by 'bafa, a lie, in Provencal. In the same way adversaries of Wiclif traced in his name an abridgement of 'wicked- belief. Metternich was 'Mitternacht, or Midnight, for the political reformers of Germany in the last generation.
In his anxiety to make his rendering close, and mindful, perhaps, of the warning in the Apocalypse, "If any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life," Wiclif followed the Latin order of construction so literally as to make rather awkward English, translating, for example, Quib sibi vult hoc somnium? by What to itself wole this sweven?
Thus the fine distinction between 'yea' and 'yes, 'nay' and 'no, once existing in English, has quite disappeared. 'Yea' and 'Nay, in Wiclif s time, and a good deal later, were the answers to questions framed in the affirmative. 'Will he come? To this it would have been replied, 'Yea' or 'Nay, as the case might be.
Pierre d'Ailly said to the Emperor Sigismund: "Almost all the articles are based on Wiclif, so that the Englishman John Stokes was right in saying Hus had no right to boast of these teachings as his property, since they all demonstrably belonged to Wiclif." In order to embitter the Emperor against Hus, they tried to show his teachings to be dangerous to the civil government.
They always demanded at least a form of home government. That made England a congenial home for the Protestant spirit, which claimed the right to independent study of the sources of religion and independent judgment regarding them. It was only a continuance of the spirit of Wiclif and the Lollards. The spirit in a nation lives long, especially when it is passed down by tradition.
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