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Updated: June 25, 2025
Wiclif and Hus are the constellation "Gemini," or Twins, shining in the papal night till their dim twinkling is swallowed up in the glorious sun bursting from Wittenberg in Luther. The Synod of Pisa tried to reform the Church and failed. The Synod of Constance tried it and failed. The Synod of Basel and Ferrara tried it and failed.
Twenty years after it was completed copies were counted very valuable, though they were very numerous. It would be difficult to exaggerate the influence of this gift to the English people. It constitutes the standard of Middle English. Chaucer and Wiclif stood side by side.
Wiclif had been a pioneer in the work of translation and publication, but Tyndale and Coverdale in the sixteenth century supplied what he had aimed at doing in the fourteenth. The fifteenth century was the quiet dark hour before the dawn.
The knavery, greed, and hypocrisy of the begging friars and the sellers of indulgences are exposed by him as pitilessly as by Langland and Wiclif, though his mood is not, like theirs, one of stern, moral indignation, but rather the good-natured scorn of a man of the world. His charity is broad enough to cover even the corrupt sompnour, of whom he says, And yet in sooth he was a good felawe.
As a result Alexander V sent a bull on Dec. 20, 1409, ordering the Archbishop to suppress all books of Wiclif and all preaching except at the usual places; this last was to silence Hus in Bethlehem Chapel. On July 16, 1410, the Archbishop burned two hundred manuscripts of Wiclif, many of them in costly binding; two days later he excommunicated Hus and his followers.
On May 4, Wiclif's writings were ordered to be burnt as heretical; his memory was condemned, and it was decreed to dig out his bones and cast them out of consecrated ground. It does not need a prophet to foretell the end of Hus. It needed only to show Hus was a follower of Wiclif, and he would be burned also. Hus Before the Council.
In the controversy between the Church and the Lollards Latin was still mainly employed, but Wiclif had written some of his tracts in English, and, in 1449, Reginald Peacock, Bishop of St. Asaph, contributed, in English, to the same controversy, The Repressor of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy.
There have been many editions of the Bible; Wiclif was the first to introduce it into England about the year 1300. The 'Paragraph Bible, as it is called, is a well-known edition, and is so called because it is divided into paragraphs.
Philosophers could frame imaginative theories of human liberty; but the people could be helped only from within themselves. Wiclif, giving them the Bible in a living language, and intimating that force was not necessarily right, began their education; and Luther, in his dogma of justification by faith alone, forged a tremendous weapon in their behalf.
At Prag Hus was now at the height of his influence, enjoying the favor of the Court; he was again elected Rector of the University. Hus is Accused to the Pope. Now Archbishop Sbynko went over to the rival pope, Alexander V, and convinced him that all the troubles in Bohemia were due to the teachings of Wiclif spread by Hus.
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