t it seems to approach the Lutheran "consubstantiation", for he applied to the Blessed Eucharist his metaphysical principle that annihilation is impossible. To attack so fundamental a doctrine tended to define the position of Wyclif and his followers. Henceforth they tend to become a people apart. The friars, with whom the "reformer" had once been on friendly terms, became their chief enemies, and the State turned against them. Old-fashioned Protestant writers, who used to treat medieval heresy as a continuous witness to the truth, found in Wyclif a convenient link between the Albigenses and the sixteenth-century reformers, and the comparison is, perhaps, of interest. Like the heretics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Wyclif started with an attack on clerical wealth; he then went on to dispute the authority of the Church and, finally, its sacramental system, but unlike them he avoided those Manich=91an tendencies which threatened the most elementary moral laws. That madness had been exorcised by the great Scholastics. On the other hand, Wyclif resembled the Protestant Reformers in his insistence on the Bible as the rule of faith, in the importance attributed to preaching, and in his sacramental doctrine. Like them, too, he looked for support to the laity and the civil state, and his conception of the kingly dignity would have satisfied even Henry VIII. The doctrine of justification by faith does not, however, occur in Wyclif's system. The English Lollards carried on but very imperfectly the tradition of Wyclif's teaching. His real spiritual inheritor was John Hus, and it was through Bohemia, if at all, that he is directly connected with the Reformation. A large number of Wyclif's Latin works have been edited and printed by the Wyclif Society. His English works have been edited by T. Arnold (Oxford, 1869-71) and by F.D. Matthew (London, 1880) for the Early English Texts Society. Many of the English tracts, however, are certainly ...
