Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
And there is something intensely English in his disgust and scorn, brave for his day, yet shielded by the great duke who was at once his protector and friend, as he was of Wyclif himself, in his severer denunciation, and advocacy of doctrines which neither Chaucer nor the Duke of Lancaster understood, and which, if they had, they would not have sympathized with nor encouraged.
Edward III. had referred this claim to Parliament, and the Parliament had rejected it without hesitation on the ground that John had no power to bind the realm without its consent. The Parliament was the mere mouthpiece of Wyclif, who was now actively engaged in political life, and probably, as Dr. Lechler thinks, had a seat in Parliament.
Nobody doubts that the whole influence of the Catholic hierarchy has ever been, and still continues to be, hostile to the perusal of the Scriptures by the people in the vulgar tongue; and it was this translation by Wyclif which made him more obnoxious to the Pope than all his tirades against the vices of the monks and the other evils which disgraced the Church.
They were called Poor Priests, and clad in long brown robes they wandered on foot through the towns and villages teaching and preaching. Wyclif trusted that they would do all the good that the old friars had done, and that they would be kept from falling into the evil ways of the later friars. But Churchmen were angry, and called his followers Lollards or idle babblers.
I am very far from sharing the opinions of Bradwardine, Wyclif, Hobbes and Spinoza, who advocate, so it seems, this entirely mathematical necessity, which I think I have adequately refuted, and perhaps more clearly than is customary. Yet one must always bear testimony to the truth and not impute to a dogma anything that does not result from it.
A few years later they complained that the followers of Wyclif abounded everywhere and in all classes, among the baronage, in the cities, among the peasantry of the countryside, even in the monastic cell itself. "Every second man one meets is a Lollard."
The age which produced Chaucer was a transition period from the Middle Ages to modern times, midway between Dante and Michael Angelo. Chaucer was the contemporary of Wyclif, with whom the Middle Ages may appropriately be said to close, or modern history to begin.
In 1882, his father was appointed to the ministry of the Congregational Church at Stonehouse, in Gloucestershire; and Frederic began his formal schooling at the Wyclif Preparatory School in that place. The country round Stonehouse a country of barish slopes and richly wooded valleys is perhaps hardly so beautiful as that which he had left and whose memory he never ceased to cherish.
Their stay upon the Continent had been short, but it had been just enough to put the finishing touch upon the work that had been going on since the days of Wyclif. Upon such men and their theories Elizabeth could not look with favour.
So he hurled his weapons, not yet impotent, and fulminated his bulls, ordering the University, under penalty of excommunication, to deliver the daring heretic into the hands of the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Bishop of London; and further commanding these two prelates to warn the King against the errors of Wyclif, and to examine him as to his doctrines, and keep him in chains until the Pope's pleasure should be further known.
Word Of The Day