History of the English Bible (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Chapter III. JOHN WYCLIFFE. That " the world knows nothing of its greatest men" is true in more senses than one. Of many who have wielded the most potent influence on the minds of their fellow-men little remains but a name. The very personality of Homer, the blind bard of Chios, is disputed; of the " thousand-souled" Shakespeare, the poet for all time, how scanty are the authentic records; and Wycliffe, the Father of the Reformation, has been compared to the "voice of one crying in the wilderness" ? a voice and nothing more?a mighty agency which, like the breath of God, blowing where it listeth, is known only in its effects. Of the birth, parentage, and early education of John Wycliffe nothing definite is known. He seems, however, to have been born about the year 1324 A.d., in the Parish of Wye-cliflfe or Water-Cliffe, near Richmond, in Yorkshire. It is said that he was early intended for the Church, and, in the seventeenth year of his age, entered Queen's College. Oxford, which was founded in 1340. He soon after changed his quarters to Merton College, where had studied some of the most eminent names ofmediaeval literature and science?Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, Occham, Robert Grosstete (or Great-head), the distinguished Bishop of Lincoln, Burley, the Preceptor of Edward III., Eastwood, the astronomer, and Bradwardine, the profound scholar and eloquent divine, who became Archbishop of Canterbury. Wycliffe applied himself with ardour and success to his studies, but the departments in which he excelled were scholastic philosophy and Divinity, " second to none in philosophy and in scholastic studies incomparable," and the knowledge he acquired in those branches soon led to important results. It revealed to him the abominations of Popery, and induced him ere long not only to di...