erpetual reproach. Reforms of the various
religious houses had been attempted, but all reforms had failed. Nor
were the lives of the secular clergy much more respectable than those of
the great body of monks. They are accused by all historians of avarice,
venality, dissoluteness, and ignorance; and it was their incapacity,
their disregard of duties, and indifference to the spiritual interests
of their flocks that led to the immense popularity of the Mendicant
friars, until they, in their turn, became perhaps a greater scandal than
the parish priests whose functions they had usurped. Both priests and
monks in the time of Bishop Grostete of Lincoln frequented taverns and
gambling-houses. So enormous and scandalous was the wealth of the
clergy, that as early as 1279, under Edward I., Parliament passed a
statute of mortmain, forbidding religious bodies to receive bequests
without the King's license.

With the increase of scandalous vices among the clergy was a corruption
in the doctrines of the Church; not those which are strictly
theological, but those which pertained to the sacraments, and the
conditions on which absolution was given and communion administered. In
the thirteenth century, as the Scholastic philosophy was reaching its
fullest development, we notice the establishment of the doctrine of
transubstantiation, the withholding the cup from the laity, and the
necessity of confession as the condition of receiving the
communion,--which corruptions increased amazingly the power of the
clergy over the minds of superstitious people, and led to still more
flagrant evils, like the sale of indulgences and the perversion of the
doctrine of penance, originally enforced in order to aid the soul to
overcome the tyranny of the body, but finally accepted as the expiation
for sin; so that the door of heaven itself was opened by venal priests
only to those whom they could control or rob.

Such was the state of the Church when Wyclif was born,--in 1324, near
Richmond in Yorkshire, about a century after the establishment of
universities, the creation of the Mendicant orders, and the memorable
usurpation of Innocent III.

In the year 1340, during the reign of Edward III., we find him at the
age of sixteen a student in Merton College at Oxford,--the college then
most distinguished for Scholastic doctors; the college of Islip, of
Bradwardine, of Occam, and perhaps of Duns Scotus. It would seem that
Wyclif devoted himself with great