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Updated: June 25, 2025
When Anne, the daughter of Emperor Charles IV, and sister of King Wenzel of Bohemia and of King Sigismund of Hungary, was married to King Richard II of England in 1382, there was much travel between Bohemia and England, and Jerome of Prag brought the writings of Wiclif from Oxford.
He early inherited a fair estate, took his Master of Arts degree in 1688, and began his career as writer with a refutation of attacks upon Wiclif in the "History of Heresy," by M. Varillas. He then chose law for a profession, in 1692 graduated as LL.D., and was admitted an Advocate at Doctor's Commons.
He gives us this unconscious glimpse of himself at work on this loftiest and most fruitful of tasks, which Jerome had first accomplished for Latin Christendom, Ulfila for our Scandinavian forefathers, Wiclif for the English, and Luther for the Germans of the time. "Now I must mention some of the difficulties under which we labour, particularly myself.
There must be some basis of truth for that, since we say it so confidently; but it can be much over-accented. There were many of our fathers, and of our grandfathers, who were mightily concerned with the mass of people, and looked as carefully as we do for a corrective of social evils. Wiclif, in the late fourteenth century, and Tindale, in the early sixteenth, were two such men.
They had the Bible translated in their own language; Queen Anne took with her the Gospels in Latin and German and Bohemian. In addition Milic of Kremsier and Matthias of Janov had but recently fiercely denounced the wicked lives of popes and prelates and priests. So it came that the teaching of Wiclif and the preaching of Hus fell upon the Bohemian soul as upon a prepared soil. Hus is Opposed.
On May 28, 1403, Master John Huebner in the Church of the Black Rose called attention to certain condemned statements of Wiclif many of which had been forged. Hus cried out the falsifiers ought to be executed the same as recently the two adulterators of food.
What we call the English spirit of free inquiry was fostered and developed by Wiclif and his Lollards with the English Scripture in their hands. Out of it has grown as out of no other one root the freedom of the English and American people. What Is the Bible?, p. 45. This work of Wiclif deserves the time we have given it because it asserted a principle for the English people.
Lechler's Wiclif und die Vorgeschichte der Reformation, published in 1873 proves that it was not until Wycliffe denied the doctrine of transubstantiation in 1379 or 1380 that the friars deserted him. Chron. Anglice, p. 117. On February 19, Wycliffe appeared in Courtenay's cathedral.
No wonder that the chapter should have inspired to utterances formed in its own style the Christian eloquence of later days, as in that noble closing passage of Julius Hare's Victory of Faith, where he carries on the record through the apostolic age, and the early persecutions, and the times of the Fathers, to Wilfrid and Bernard, the Waldenses, Wiclif, Luther, Latimer, down to Oberlin, and Simeon, "and Howard, and Neff, and Henry Martyn."
John Wiclif himself was a scholar of Oxford, master of that famous Balliol College which has had such a list of distinguished masters. He was of emaciated frame, spare, and well nigh destitute of strength. He was absolutely blameless in his conduct."
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