nd dying--struck
with paralysis at his chancel--in 1384, sixteen years before Chaucer.

TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE.--The labors of Wiclif which produced the most
important results, were not his violent lectures as a reformer, but the
translation of the Bible into English, the very language of the common
people, greatly to the wrath of the hierarchy and its political upholders.
This, too, is his chief glory: as a reformer he went too fast and too far;
he struck fiercely at the root of authority, imperilling what was good, in
his attack upon what was evil. In pulling up the tares he endangered the
wheat, and from him, as a progenitor, came the Lollards, a fanatical,
violent, and revolutionary sect.

But his English Bible, the parent of the later versions, cannot be too
highly valued. For the first time, English readers could search the whole
Scriptures, and judge for themselves of doctrine and authority: there they
could learn how far the traditions and commandments of men had encrusted
and corrupted the pure word of truth. Thus the greatest impulsion was
given to a reformation in doctrine; and thus, too, the exclusiveness and
arrogance of the clergy received the first of many sledge-hammer blows
which were to result in their confusion and discomfiture.

"If," says Froude,[19] "the Black Prince had lived, or if Richard II. had
inherited the temper of the Plantagenets, the ecclesiastical system would
have been spared the misfortune of a longer reprieve."

THE ASHES OF WICLIF.--The vengeance which Wiclif escaped during his life
was wreaked upon his bones. In 1428, the Council of Constance ordered that
if his bones could be distinguished from those of other, faithful people,
they should "be taken out of the ground and thrown far off from Christian
burial." On this errand the Bishop of Lincoln came with his officials to
Lutterworth, and, finding them, burned them, and threw the ashes into the
little stream called the Swift. Fuller, in his Church History, adds: "Thus
this brook has conveyed his ashes into Avon, Avon into Severn, Severn into
the narrow seas, they into the main ocean; and thus the ashes of Wiclif
are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the world
over;" or, in the more carefully selected words of an English laureate of
modern days,[20]

... this deed accurst,
An emblem yields to friends and enemies,
How the bold teacher's doctrine, _sanctified
By truth_, sh