itual health
of the other Churches over which Rome exercised so wide an influence.
Wiser and calmer men than Wickliffe saw the need of some reformation,
though they questioned, and, as the event showed, rightly, the wisdom
and the justice of the steps he took towards his object. Wickliffe's
teaching in the fourteenth century had, in fact, little or nothing to
do with the real Reformation of two hundred years later, except that
some of his dangerous theories on political matters took deeper root
than did his {150} religious peculiarities, and bore fruit in much of
the unprincipled licence which was an unhappy, though by no means an
essential, feature of the Reformation era.

[Sidenote: English longings for reformation.]

England, in common with the other nations of Europe, was willing to
hope for great benefit from the councils of the Church held in the
fifteenth century; and, at each of them, we find English Clergy making
grave and urgent protests against the abuses which they saw around
them, and pleading for a return to purer and better ways. Thus, at the
Council of Pisa, A.D. 1400, one of the English Bishops who attended it
presented a memorial which complained of the evils resulting from the
want of episcopal control over the monasteries, from the practice of
appeals to Rome, and from the ease with which dispensations for
non-residence and pluralities were obtained[3]. Again, at the Council
of Constance (A.D. 1415) a sermon was preached by Dr. Abendon, an
Oxford professor, which painted in very strong language the worldliness
and covetousness of the non-resident Bishops and Clergy; and these
protests were followed up by an official appeal to the Pope for a
reformation, on the part of the Kings of France and England, A.D. 1425,
as well as by official instructions given to the English deputation
despatched to the Council of Basle (A.D. 1431), to use their influence
for the same end.

{151}

Section 2. _The Church of Ireland._

The Church of Ireland was not, like the Church of Great Britain, to
which it owes its foundation, a prey to the depressing influences of
the heathen Saxons; and, at the time of the mission of St. Augustine,
the daughter was in some measure enabled to repay to the mother the
benefits which the British St. Patrick had conferred on the scene of
his missionary labours. A constant intercourse was kept up between the
numerous monasteries of Ireland and those of Wales and Scotland, some
of