Sit summa Patri gloria,
Natoque, pro no is egens
Qui factus est de divite;
Par sit tibi laus, Spiritus.

To God the Father praise be given,
To Spirit, who doth dwell in heaven,
And unto Him who became poor,
That we might find the door.

DISCIPLINA ARCANA.

On the rough seas He seemed passing by,
But they constrained Him; and at Emmaus one
Bent on a journey onward, but they won
His presence, for their souls were beating high
With nameless worship: oft from heedless eye,
With type and shadowy word, He veiled the Sun
Of Righteousness, nor ever fully shone

On doubting hearts his healing Deity.
Mysterious Wisdom, which man's spirit knew!
Then blame not if the church from the world's view,
In treasures of her grace, doth sit apart,
Needing inquiring eye and faithful heart,
For ever watchful, but to careless glance
Ne'er full unveils her blissful countenance !

DISCIPLINA EXTERNA.

Oн, for the Rod of ancient Discipline!
Unheeded and unheeding o'er the plain
They wander shepherdless-are caught and slain,
With none to help! Oh, for the sacred sign
Of pastoral severity benign!

Spirit of noble Ambrose, wake again!

Where Aaron's rod, silencing mouths profane,

The living emblem prov'd indeed divine.

Yea, the whole land is sick, the troubled state
Can neither cure her ills nor bear their weight,
And in the church's bosom the fount springs-
Novel opinions, bold and wild, and hate
Of church authority, and hate of kings,
All-filial disobedience spreading wings.

[Erratum in the last Number,-p. 257, for "cleanse the wild thistle," read “cleave.”]

Lyra Apostolica.

Γνοῖεν δ', ὡς δὴ δηρὸν ἐγὼ πολέμοιο πέπαυμαι.

NO. XXIII.

1. THE JEWS.

O PITEOUS race!

Fearful to look upon,

Once standing in high place,

Heaven's eldest son.

WHEN first God stirred me, and the church's word
Came as a theme of reverent search and fear,
It little cost to own the lustre clear

O'er rule she taught, and rite, and doctrine poured;
For conscience craved, and reason did accord.
Yet one there was that wore a mien austere,
And I did doubt, and, troubled, asked to hear
Whose mouth had force to edge so sharp a sword.
My mother oped her trust, the holy Book;
And healed my pang. She pointed, and I found
Christ on himself, considerate Master, took
The utterance of that doctrine's fearful sound.
The Fount of Love his servants sends to tell
Love's deeds; Himself reveals the sinner's hell.

3. THE HEATHEN.

'MID Balak's magic fires

The Spirit spake, clear as in Israel;
With prayers untrue and covetous desires

Did God vouchsafe to dwell;

Who summoned dreams, his earlier word to bring
To holy Job's vexed friends, and Gaza's guileless king.

If such o'erflowing grace

From Aaron's vest e'en on the Sibyl ran,

Why should we fear, the Son now lacks his place
Where roams unchristened man?

As though, when faith is keen, He cannot make
Bread of the very stones, or thirst with ashes slake.

CORRESPONDENCE.

The Editor begs to remind his readers that he is not responsible for the opinions
of his Correspondents.

JOHN WYCLIFF E. - No. II.

SIR,-The object of my last communication was principally to draw the attention of your readers to the duty which the church of England owes to one of her most illustrious sons-the duty, I mean, of collecting and publishing the numerous remaining writings of John Wycliffe. Until his works be placed within our reach in a collected form, I conceive it to be impossible to arrive at a correct view of his real character and opinions. Mr. Vaughan, indeed, professes to give us "the history of Wycliffe's mind;"-he professes to demonstrate that the mind of Wycliffe," as reflected in his works, exhibits a constant progression;"—that "the Wycliffe of 1375 was a less enlightened man than the Wycliffe of 1377, and that the Wycliffe of 1384 was a character in which protestant principle had become still more ascendant;" and Mr. Vaughan professes, further, to have come at this "secret,' (for so he terms it,+) by examining the contents, and ascertaining the dates of the Wycliffe MSS., a labour, he adds, "to which no man, since the days of Wycliffe, had pretended to apply himself."

Now, I do not mean to deny that Mr. Vaughan did, (nay, his work exhibits evident proof that he did,) to a certain extent, make himself acquainted with the original authorities, from which alone the information he was in search of could be derived; but I confess I am sceptical about the accuracy of any knowledge of Wycliffe's real senti

• Pref. to 2nd edit. p. xv.

+ "Before the publication of these volumes, the dates of the reformer's writings were, with a few trivial exceptions, unknown. The history of the mind of Wycliffe was, in consequence, a secret." Pref. 2nd edit. pp. xiv. xv.

Ibid. p. xvi.

ments, which can be acquired in the present scattered and imperfect state of his numerous writings. To say nothing of the acquaintance with black letter and Anglo-Saxon necessary to every one who would even read them, the difficulty of bringing them into juxtaposition, and the great variations which are to be found in the different extant MSS., even of the same work, create obstacles sufficient, I think, to deter any one from dogmatising about the "secret history" of Wycliffe's mind. But, besides this, Mr. Vaughan laboured under other disadvantages-he wrote with a theory ready formed; "a constant progression" in the mind of Wycliffe he was resolved to make out, and the platform of modern nonconformity was, with him, the "ascendancy of protestant principle," at which he was determined that Wycliffe should ultimately arrive; it is not, therefore, very surprising that Wycliffe's declamations against papal usurpation should be interpreted as the "novel sentiments" of an ecclesiastical revolutionist, and that his censure of the mendicant orders, (the voluntary systems, be it remembered, of that day,) should be regarded as analogous to modern attacks upon the temporalities of the church, and the characters of the clergy.

Before I proceed to a more minute examination of the accounts given by Mr. Vaughan and other writers of particular opinions said to have been maintained by Wycliffe, I shall give a few examples of a kind of negligence (to use no harsher word), which, prior to any more close investigation, must create, in every mind, some doubts as to Mr. Vaughan's peculiar claims upon our attention, when he professes to exhibit to his reader the different periods of the life of Wycliffe, "not only under an increased light, but generally under a true light, in place of a false one."*

The tenth chapter of our author's second volume is devoted to an account of the writings of Wycliffe; it is divided into five sections, the first of which contains a list of his printed works, and the second, on which I wish to make a few remarks, is headed thus:

SECTION II.

This

Including the Wycliffe manuscripts extant in England and Ireland.
series contains nearly forty MSS. preserved in the library of Trinity Col-
lege, Dublin, the existence of which has been hitherto unknown to the Re-
former's biographers.

From what I had previously known of the MSS. alluded to, I confess I was not quite prepared for this statement; I knew that in Mr. Lewis's time the learned Dr. Timothy Godwin, then Bishop of Kilmore, and afterwards Archbishop of Cashel, and also Dr. Robert Howard, then a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin,† had examined the library of that university for Mr. Lewis, and had transmitted to him a notice of its contents; I thought it strange that so many as forty important MSS. (a number very nearly equal to the whole number of Wycliffe MSS. which that library contains) should have escaped the search of such men, especially as a catalogue of the whole

* Pref. 2nd edit., p. xvi.

+ Afterwards Bishop of Elphin, in Ireland.

VOL. VII.-April, 1835.

3 G

MS. library had, before their time, been printed at Oxford.* I set myself, therefore, to compare Mr. Vaughan's list with that of Mr. Lewis, for the purpose of ascertaining what the newly discovered MSS. were, and, notwithstanding my previous suspicions, I confess I was surprised to find that it did not contain a single article which was not already mentioned and described by Mr. Lewis. I looked back again to Mr. Vaughan's statement, in the hope that it might bear another interpretation, and that the meaning probably was, that his predecessors had made no use of the forty MSS. in question; but nothe words cannot be mistaken-they tell us that the very existence of these MSS. was hitherto unknown to the reformer's biographers.

Again, Articles 10 and 11 of Mr. Vaughan's list (sect. ii. p. 386,) are as follows:

"10. How Satanas and his Priests, and his feyned Religions” [a misprint for Religious]" casten by three cursed Heresies to destroy all good living and meyntening" [qu.? meyntenen]"all manner of sin. It begins thus, As Almighty God in Trinity ordeineth men to come to the bliss of heaven by three grounds,' &c., &c."

“11. De nequitiis ejusdem. This piece in English has a title beginning with the words, How Antichrist and his Clerks travellen to destroy holy writ, and to make Cristen Men unstable in the faith,' &c., &c."

Now the question is, to what ejusdem, in the title of art. 11, refers. Doubtless the reader will suppose that it refers to Satanas in the title of the preceding tract, and that No. 11 is a treatise De nequitiis Satana; but, upon referring to Mr. Lewis, we find that it is a treatise, De nequitiis Papæ Romani. In Mr. Lewis's list, Nos. 63 and 64,† we

have

Pro eo quod, &c."

"63. De Papa Romano, lib. 1. "64. De nequitiis ejusdem, lib. 1. Sicut noster Dominus Jesus Christus. A copy of this is in English in the aforesaid collection in C. C. C. in Cambridge with this title, 'How Antichrist and his Clerks travailen to destroy holy writ'

...........

Here, then, we see where it was that Mr. Vaughan got his ejusdem ; he copied Lewis apparently, without perceiving that the change he thought fit to make in the context required the further alteration of the pronoun into its omitted noun.

I shall notice one other point, in the hope of obtaining information on the subject from some of your correspondents. Section I., as I have already remarked, contains a list of Wycliffe's printed works, and the last article mentioned in it is the following:

"12. Pro egentibus Presbyteris, lib. 1. Sunt causæ quæ urgeant pauperiores, or why poor priests have no benefices.' This tract is in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, and in C. C. C. Cambridge. It was first printed by Mr. Lewis."

Now, I cannot find that this tract was ever printed at all—much less that is was printed by Mr. Lewis, who speaks of it in the following words:

* Catalogi Libror. Manuscriptorum Angliæ et Hiberniæ. Oxon, fol. 1697. + Oxford edit. of 1820, p. 192.

It may be right to mention that Lewis's list is grounded on that of Bp. Bale, and that the order in which the tracts above mentioned are placed by Lewis originated with that writer. (De Scriptoribus Anglia, cent. vi.) Bale, however, gives only the mere titles, printed by Lewis in italics.