has hated, it is private judgment. The very phrase is
obnoxious. It means the emancipation of the people from papal domination
and ecclesiastical bondage of all description; while the thing itself is
subversive of all the claims which the Catholic hierarchy have ever put
forth as to the authority of the Church as an institution: it has
undermined and will continue to undermine spiritual despotism,--the
great evil of the Middle Ages and of the Papal Church in our times. The
unrestrained circulation of the Scriptures in the language the people
can understand must lead to the breaking up of the false doctrines and
all the instruments by which the clergy have maintained their
usurpations. It necessarily opens the eyes of the people to the
antichristian doctrine of penance, to the absurdity of indulgences for
sin, to the unwarranted worship of the Virgin Mary, to the monstrous
claim of papal infallibility, and to all other glaring usurpations by
which the popes have ruled the world. There is not a false doctrine in
religion, nor an antichristian form of worship, nor a usurped
prerogative of the Pope and clergy, which the unrestrained perusal of
the Scriptures does not expose. "_Hinc illae lacrymae_." The dignitaries
of the Roman Catholic Church are not fools. They know that the free
circulation of the Scriptures in vulgar tongues does undermine their
authority, and will ultimately destroy the edifice of pride and pomp and
power which it took a thousand years to build. This is what they ever
have consistently opposed and will continue to oppose, as a thing
dangerous to them. They would have destroyed, if they could, every copy
of the version which Wyclif made. And now, when they can no longer
prevent the Bible from being printed, they would exclude it from the
schools which they control, and from the houses of those who belong to
their Church. Doubtless the well-known opposition to the circulation of
the Bible in the vernacular has been exaggerated, but in the fourteenth
century it was certainly bitter and furious. Wyclif might expose vices
which everybody saw and lamented as a scandal, and make himself
obnoxious to those who committed them; but to open the door to free
inquiry and a reformed faith and hostility to the Pope,--this was a
graver offence, to be visited with the severest penalties. To the storm
of indignation thus raised against him Wyclif's only answer was: "The
clergy cry aloud that it is heresy to speak of the H