oly Scriptures in
English, and so they would condemn the Holy Ghost, who gave tongues to
the Apostles of Christ to speak the Word of God in all languages
under heaven."

Notwithstanding the enormous cost of the Bible as translated by
Wyclif,--L2, 16s. 8d., a sum probably equal to thirty pounds, or one
hundred and fifty dollars of our present money, more than half the
annual income of a substantial yeoman,--still it was copied and
circulated with remarkable rapidity. Neither the cost of the valuable
manuscript nor the opposition and vigilance of an almost omnipresent
inquisition were able to suppress it.

Wyclif was now about fifty-eight years of age. He had rendered a
transcendent service to the English nation, and a service that not one
of his contemporaries could have performed,--to which only the foremost
scholar and theologian of his day was equal. After such a work he might
have reposed in his quiet parish in genial rest, conscious that he had
opened a new era in the history of his country. But rest was not for
him. He now appears as a doctrinal controversialist. Hitherto his
attacks had been against the flagrant external evils of the Church, the
enormous corruptions that had entered into the institutions which
sustained the papal power. "He had been the advocate of the University
in defence of her privileges, the champion of the Crown in vindication
of its rights and prerogatives, the friend of the people in the
preservation of their property.... He now assailed the Romish doctrine
of the eucharist," but without the support of those powerful princes and
nobles who had hitherto sustained him. He combats one of the prevailing
ideas of the age,--a more difficult and infinitely bolder thing,--which
theologians had not dared to assail, and which in after-times was a
stumbling-block to Luther himself. In ascending the mysterious mount
where clouds gathered around him his old friends began to desert him,
for now he assailed the awful and invisible. The Church of the Middle
Ages had asserted that the body of Christ was actually present in the
consecrated wafer, and few there were who doubted it. Berengar had
maintained in the eleventh century that the sacred elements should be
regarded as mere symbols; but he was vehemently opposed, with all the
terrors of spiritual power, and compelled to abjure the heresy. In the
year 1215, at a Lateran, Council, Innocent III. established the doctrine
of transubstantiation as one of t