John Wycliffe — J. C. Ryle
From Light from Old Times.
It is an old and true saying that nations sometimes know little about some of their greatest benefactors. If there ever was a man to whom this saying applies, it is John Wycliffe, the forerunner and first beginner of the Protestant Reformation in England. To Wycliffe, England owes an enormous debt, yet Wycliffe is a man of whom most Englishmen know little or nothing.
In drawing up a few pages about this great and godly man, the words of the Apostle Peter rise up before my mind. He says, “I think it fit to stir you up by putting you in remembrance” (2 Peter 1:13). This is exactly what I want to do in this paper. I wish to stir up my readers, and try to make them remember and never forget the man who has been justly called “The Morning Star of the English Reformation.”
I. First and foremost, I shall ask you to remember the religious condition of England in the age when Wycliffe lived.
I shall make no apology for dwelling briefly on this point. A right understanding of it lies at the very root of my whole subject. Without this it is impossible to form a correct estimate of the man about whom I am writing; of the enormous difficulties he had to contend with; and of the greatness of the work which he did.
John Wycliffe was born in the north of Yorkshire, on the banks of the Tees, about the year 1324, in the reign of Edward II., and died in 1384, in the reign of Richard II., more than five hundred years ago. So you will remember that he was born at least a hundred years before the invention of printing, and died about a hundred years before the great German Reformer, Martin Luther, was born. These two facts alone should never be forgotten.
The three centuries immediately preceding our English Reformation, in the middle of which Wycliffe lived, were probably the darkest period in the history of English Christianity. It was a period when the Church of this land was thoroughly, entirely, and completely Roman Catholic—when the Bishop of Rome was the spiritual head of the Church—when Romanism reigned supreme from the Isle of Wight to Berwick-on-Tweed, and from the Land’s End to the North Foreland, and ministers and people were all Papists. It is no exaggeration to say that for these three centuries before the Reformation, Christianity in England seems to have been buried under a mass of ignorance, superstition, priestcraft, and immorality. The likeness between the religion of this period and that of the apostolic age was so small, that if Paul had risen from the dead he would hardly have called it Christianity at all!
Such were the days when Wycliffe lived. Such were the difficulties which he had to encounter. I charge my readers not to forget them. The man who could do the work he did, and leave the mark that he left on his generation, must have been no common man. I go further: he must have been a servant of Christ, of rare grace and gifts, and singularly filled with the Holy Spirit. I say he is a man worthy of all honor, and we do well to keep him in remembrance.
II. Let me now turn from Wycliffe’s time to Wycliffe’s work.
That Wycliffe did a great work in a very dark day—that he made a deep impression on his generation—that he was felt and acknowledged to be “a power” in England both by Church and Parliament, for some twenty-five years, is a simple matter of history which no well-read person can deny.
But there is much obscurity about his early life. We know nothing of his first schools and schoolmasters, and can only guess that he may have picked up the first rudiments of his education at Eggleston Priory, on the Tees. But we do know that he went to Oxford between 1335 and 1340, and profited so much by the instruction he got there that he obtained a very high reputation as one of the most learned men of his day. He was made Master of Balliol in 1361, and was afterwards connected with Queen’s, Merton, and Canterbury Hall. From that date for about twenty years, when he retired to Lutterworth, Oxford seems to have been his head-quarters, though he evidently was often in London. Lecturing, preaching, writing both for learned and unlearned, arguing, controversy—appear to have been the diet of his life. But we have no minute and systematic account of his life from the pen of any contemporary biographer. How he first obtained his sound theological views—whether he learned anything from Archbishop Bradwardin, who preceded him—whether he was intimate with Fitzralph of Armagh, Chancellor of Oxford, or the famous Grostète, Bishop of Lincoln—who, in short, were his helpers and fellow-laborers, or whether he had none and stood alone—on all these points we know little or nothing. It is useless, however, to complain, as there was no printing in Wycliffe’s day, and few could read or write. I shall not waste time in guessing, but shall content myself with mentioning four facts which are beyond controversy, and pointing out four reasons why Wycliffe’s name should always be honored in England.