areless times."

But it was at a terrible risk such study was carried on. The appearance
of Wycliffe's Bible aroused at once fierce opposition. A bill was
brought into parliament to forbid the circulation of the Scriptures in
English; but the sturdy John of Gaunt vigorously asserted the right of
the people to have the Word of God in their own tongue; "for why," said
he, "are we to be the dross of the nations?" However, the rulers of the
Church grew more and more alarmed at the circulation of the book. At
length Archbishop Arundel, a zealous but not very learned prelate,
complained to the Pope of "that pestilent wretch, John Wycliffe, the son
of the old Serpent, the forerunner of Antichrist, who had completed his
iniquity by inventing a new translation of the Scriptures"; and, shortly
after, the Convocation of Canterbury forbade such translations, under
penalty of the major excommunication.

"God grant us," runs the prayer in the old Bible preface, "to ken and to
kepe well Holie Writ, and to suffer joiefulli some paine for it at the
laste." What a meaning that prayer must have gained when the readers of
the book were burned with the copies round their necks, when men and
women were executed for teaching their children the Lord's Prayer and
Ten Commandments in English, when husbands were made to witness against
their wives, and children forced to light the death-fires of their
parents, and possessors of the banned Wycliffe Bible were hunted down as
if they were wild beasts!

Thus did Wycliffe, in his effort for the spread of the Gospel of Peace,
bring, like his Master fourteen centuries before, "not peace, but a
sword." Every bold attempt to let in the light on long-standing darkness
seems to result first in a fierce opposition from the evil creatures
that delight in the darkness, and the weak creatures weakened by
dwelling in it so long. It is not till the driving back of the evil and
the strengthening of the weak, as the light gradually wins its way, that
the true results can be seen. It is, to use a simile of a graceful
modern writer,[71] "As when you raise with your staff an old flat stone,
with the grass forming a little hedge, as it were, around it as it lies.
Beneath it, what a revelation! Blades of grass flattened down,
colorless, matted together, as if they had been bleached and ironed;
hideous crawling things; black crickets with their long filaments
sticking out on all sides; motionless, slug-like creatures;