which his
influence had been hitherto all-powerful, at once condemned him. John of
Gaunt enjoined him to be silent. Wyclif was presiding as Doctor of Divinity
over some disputations in the schools of the Augustinian Canons when his
academical condemnation was publicly read, but though startled for the
moment he at once challenged Chancellor or doctor to disprove the
conclusions at which he had arrived. The prohibition of the Duke of
Lancaster he met by an open avowal of his teaching, a confession which
closes proudly with the quiet words, "I believe that in the end the truth
will conquer."

[Sidenote: Rise of Lollardry]

For the moment his courage dispelled the panic around him. The University
responded to his appeal, and by displacing his opponents from office
tacitly adopted his cause. But Wyclif no longer looked for support to the
learned or wealthier classes on whom he had hitherto relied. He appealed,
and the appeal is memorable as the first of such a kind in our history, to
England at large. With an amazing industry he issued tract after tract in
the tongue of the people itself. The dry, syllogistic Latin, the abstruse
and involved argument which the great doctor had addressed to his academic
hearers, were suddenly flung aside, and by a transition which marks the
wonderful genius of the man the schoolman was transformed into the
pamphleteer. If Chaucer is the father of our later English poetry, Wyclif
is the father of our later English prose. The rough, clear, homely English
of his tracts, the speech of the ploughman and the trader of the day though
coloured with the picturesque phraseology of the Bible, is in its literary
use as distinctly a creation of his own as the style in which he embodied
it, the terse vehement sentences, the stinging sarcasms, the hard
antitheses which roused the dullest mind like a whip. Once fairly freed
from the trammels of unquestioning belief, Wyclif's mind worked fast in its
career of scepticism. Pardons, indulgences, absolutions, pilgrimages to the
shrines of the saints, worship of their images, worship of the saints
themselves, were successively denied. A formal appeal to the Bible as the
one ground of faith, coupled with an assertion of the right of every
instructed man to examine the Bible for himself, threatened the very
groundwork of the older dogmatism with ruin. Nor were these daring denials
confined to the small circle of scholars who still clung to him. The
"Simple Prie